


Casavir

by Oeskathine



Series: Ingrid of Neverwinter Nights [3]
Category: Neverwinter (Video Game), Neverwinter Nights
Genre: A Questioning Mind in a Horrible World, And Now For Something Completely Different, Clever characters, Corrupted Rulers, F/M, Illusions of Youth, Medieval Vibe, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Running the military, Strong Female Characters, Survivor Guilt, The Wars That Shape Us, The plague, Too Much Background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:21:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 54,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28807242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oeskathine/pseuds/Oeskathine
Summary: This is an extremely introspective take on where Casavir's fate took him before he joined the Knight-Captain. Why is a charismatic holy warrior so disappointed in the power of hierarchy and order? What can make a man feel old and bitter so early in his life? Why does it take him years to accept that a woman can love him? Rated T because this is war and plague and death.
Relationships: Casavir/Knight Captain (Neverwinter Nights)
Series: Ingrid of Neverwinter Nights [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1602145
Comments: 12
Kudos: 10





	1. The Home

When the grey-bearded monk shows up on the doorstep of their home, Casavir is mostly scared for his sisters. As the ten-year-old boy is led out into the stuffy Neverwinter night he glances back at the curtained windows above the workshop – they are dark and blind, a sign of the recent death in the house – and hopes that Kayla will learn to warm milk for the little one. The child has no name yet – in the three days the fever was gnawing at their pale unconscious mother Casavir was the only one who acknowledged the existence of the newborn life and had the courage to ask the old fishwife who lives next door for help and advice.

Kayla will have to grow faster and take the responsibility, he thinks distantly, trying to keep up with the monk. Or maybe Father will have another wife, and Casavir prays tentatively that she be a kind woman. He is not sure that he has the right to pray for anything seeing that he is the reason their mother died. A late child, an answer to his mother’s prayers, he had been promised to the gods before he was born; he was supposed to be taken away as soon as her womb brought another male child about, so he was never seen as a real child by Father – a temporary guest, a changeling with blue eyes, an outsider, a substitute for an heir.

They turn into another alley, and for some reason Casavir finds it important to sum up his life into precise words so that at least the gist of it stays with him when the gods take him back from the world. He thinks of the day Kayla was born and Father took one look at the baby, turned around on his heels and ran out of the room, down the stairs, out the door, up the street, into the tavern. And then he returned drunk, angry and cruel, and bruises bloomed on Mother’s face and wrists for the following week, but she did not let him throw Kayla off the balcony while he shouted curses. He thinks of all the good things that happened to him – their little garden with herbs and flowers, the neighbour’s dog that had a litter of fluffy grey puppies, the freshly baked bread in the kitchen, the quiet evening stories, the books he learned to read, the day he and Kayla quarreled ‘forever’ and made up an hour later. 

Casavir has read in his books that such childhood memories are going to fade. He does not want to let them go without a fight, but he also has doubts whether he deserves them after all. He is a promised child, a donated soul, a mercy of fertility in exchange for a lifetime of service. He has heard that children like him do not really have parents, they are lent from the gods and must return to the gods. Mother borrowed him, Father refused to return him, the gods took her life as part of the overdue payment. Did they have the right to do so? Did they have a choice not to? Casavir knows that the ugly feeling in his chest is resentment, and he stamps down on it: if he does not understand the terms of the bargain he cannot judge the gods. He can be sad, tired, and anxious – but he does not want to be angry and selfish because it is the anger and selfishness of Father that led them all here.

By the time they approach the massive gate of the chapterhouse Casavir locks his childhood deep in his heart and is ready to pay for the misjudged decisions of his parents. They walk up the gravel path and he subdues his pride and self-pity and tells himself that he will serve honestly and humbly if this is what they needed to have done. He looks up at the wooden faces of the Triad in the temple where the grey-bearded monk leaves him to wait kneeling; he implores them to take everything from him and not from anyone else in his family. Let Kayla grow into the sunny girl she should be; let the nameless child be safe and happy; let their father have his treasured male heir; let our mother’s soul rest in peace, he thinks passionately, as if the sheer force of his wish can make it happen, let me be the only one to pay your due; let the evil you did not want to bring about stop at me. 

He searches the faces of the three wooden statues –Torm, Ilmater and Tyr. Duty, mercy and justice, all of them so fitting his determination. The third statue has a bandage over its eyes, and someone splashed red paint all over it with a generous hand to represent blood. Justice is blind and ugly, it does not see who suffers the toll of its hammer. Casavir inclines his head before the third statue. He gets a fleeting sensation that the god of justice must be hurting from all the grief he has to cause, and compassion floods his tired mind.

When another monk, an older and more fragile one, appears in the doorstep and beckons Casavir to follow him, the boy straightens his shoulders and resolves himself to his fate.

There is nobody in the now empty temple to notice a glimmer run across the wooden figure of Tyr.


	2. The Chapterhouse

The chapterhouse gets its name from the ancient function of the main building: clergy of the Triad gathered here to advise rulers of these lands. Now that the chapter does not meet anymore, the magnificent stone walls host a refectory and the castellan’s office, and numerous smaller buildings have sprung up around it: dormitories, teaching halls, small libraries, stables, a balneary, an infirmary, all connected with an arcade cloister – monks constructed the school, and whatever monks construct will look like a monastery and smell like a monastery. There is also an orchard and a cemetery, and several training grounds. The boisterous city is seen in the distance; the chapterhouse is separated from it by a wall, a wood, a hillside, but most effectively – by the secluded and busy routine inside.

During his first year at the chapterhouse Casavir finds the courage to ask about his family once; there is that stern monk that goes out into the city from time to time to deliver letters and run errands, and he might ask around if he wanted. At his timid request, the stern monk holds him waiting with an unimpressed stare for a long nervous moment and then gives him a quiet rebuke. His true family is all around him; any life he used to have is fallen leaves and last year’s snow now; cherishing what was not his will only cause suffering. The boy schools his features into guilt and hides his treasured memories deeper.

In other aspects, Casavir takes to monastic life seamlessly, and his calm focus translates well into the daily order of studies, training, chores, and prayers. There are about fifty children in their teens here, and two dozen of younger ones, so it is easy to blend in the mass of them. He does not make friends seeing that he is the youngest one in the dormitory and the things he thinks about are implicitly forbidden topics, but he does not make any enemies either, so he considers it an achievement and stays friendly, mostly silent and unchallengingly distant. 

Days follow days, months grow into a year, and then another one. He may be a borrowed soul, but he has eyes and ears, so he studies and learns. He does not think he is particularly clever – but he is rather lucky to have sharp memory, and while many of his fellow novices struggle, he needs little effort to memorize the countless codes, odes, chants, regulations, ceremony protocols, doctrines and readings by noble clerics of the past. He likes reading most of all activities in the chapterhouse, and maybe sword practice comes second, because these are the two tasks that clear all thought from his mind. In reading, he can be anyone else; in sword practice, time is lost to extreme concentration where minutes last like hours and hours fly like minutes.

"He spends too much time reading history books, Sister Martha", Casavir hears Father Andrew say about him at the midday meal and turns this thought over in his mind like a smooth pebble for several days. Is it a sin? It is undesirable? Will it spoil him for the service? He looks into himself and admits that he appreciates annals and chronicles because they have a plot that does not necessarily lead right into the moral; because historic figures linger with him and he spends nights thinking of how their lives might go down differently if they had a little more luck or made a different decision; because he tries on their mantles and something in him changes. He sits a little straighter in class because a knight he likes was described with “his back as upright as his words”, and he intercepts his vague intention to live the metaphor only when he is on his guard against it. All these discoveries do not keep Casavir from reading, for he concludes that reading does him more good than harm, but they do bring an echo of guilt every time the book in his hands is not a spiritual one.

"Are you that eager to die young, child?", he receives as a sad admonition from their Sister-in-Charge when she invites him into her office to talk about his path one sunlit morning. There are three paths any novice can choose to trail. He can become a monk and stay in the quiet of their collective research and duties; he can pledge his life to a certain god as a cleric and go out into the world to guide the flock; he can take vows of a paladin and serve as a knight-errant of his church, defending faith with his sword and his habit. Casavir lowers his head and tries not to show he is wounded at such reaction to his uncovered aspiration. The tall and robust Sister-in-Charge sighs and pushes aside her maternal feelings that demand her to hug this taciturn boy and ruffle his hair. She makes him promise to think more about it.

Casavir does his best and weighs the three paths again. Can he be a monk? Life of solitude and scholarship is so appealing, and he is sure he would enjoy the enlightened peace it promises to his days. Yet this is what revolts him: in the serenity of sheltered faith, he will forget that people suffer outside their walls. Does he have the right to be safe and full when they are in trouble and hungry? Will it be enough for him to give the gods their due?

Being a cleric means offering guidance and administering rites. He will be sent to some village as a priest and run the church, serve the residents, heal them, bless them. Casavir knows he could be content with this kind of life, that every mended knee and every cured fever would give him fulfillment, and that he might even find some sense of belonging there. It is an honourable course. He is tempted to follow it, but who is he to guide and supervise? And will a long life of religious leadership be enough to pay his debt?

Not many novices choose paladinhood. Paladins exercise a strict code of conduct, a merest breaching of which can make one fall and lose all benevolence of the gods; paladins lead a lonely and perilous life on the road when a roof over your head for the night is a luxury; paladins bear the brunt of every war, every invasion, any attack of evil with their own body – no arrows or fireballs, only direct combat and may the gods choose whose cause is fair. Paladins also die young, which may signify the sad truth that the gods sometimes forget to interfere. Casavir thinks that this is the path that scares him most and therefore he ought to choose it. He is anxious to find a way to serve with his mind, his body, his soul ultimately, without a modicum of reservation. Risking his life and being in danger seems to be it.

Years later Casavir will look back at this logic and smile at how faulted it was; he will realize he has chosen the right path for all the wrong reasons, and his well-structured guilt was a phantom constructed by that lost and pensive child he had been. That year the child returns to the kind Sister-in-Charge and insists that he has chosen the path of a paladin. He is ascribed a mentor and more hours of athletic practice. 

Catherine Harkenhart of Tyr greets him at the practice course at the sunrise of the following morning. She is a head taller than he is, she hits with the force of a healthy bull and finds him inadequate at every step. Within an hour his body is disintegrated into competing pools of pain; within two hours he arrives at the revelation that every small tendon can be twisted differently and strained more; by the end of the third hour Catherine Harkenhart lowers her unsharpened practice sword and inquires curiously if he is going to acknowledge the limits of his body or faint first. Casavir gets told off for his unnecessary and vain conviction that he should neglect the shortcomings of his physique and is dismissed after the chiding lecture that his enemies will just need to wait until his own stubbornness kills him.

Casavir sleeps with the other novices in the cold stone building, bathes in icy morning water, wears his rough robe and moves from one daily chore to another without complaint. In fact, he welcomes the restrictions he obviously deserves and tries to catch and kill any pitiful thought as it is born. They train with blunt swords every morning. The ache in his muscles tells him he will be able to fight better for those who cannot. When his back is sore after a day of hard work or diligent studies, he thinks of metal plates of heavy armour and stubbornly endures the pain. Even if he is punished and the punishment is unjust, he takes it with clenched teeth and says to himself that he needs this injustice for him to remember that the world is unjust.

The long classes held in the teaching halls and libraries take a good part of his day. He is sure that names of angels have nothing to do with what his life will be, yet he learns them by heart as required and recites the long list in the quiet of the study hall – out of respect for the teachers and a deeper and better kind of respect to those who mined this knowledge from countless accounts of witnesses, prophets and blessed priests. He whispers the required lessons under his breath while he learns to ride in full armour, or exercises in the practice field, or scrubs the greasy pots clean in the kitchen. Day after day he is so tired that he falls asleep as soon as his head touches the hard bed, and in this permanent exhaustion he does not notice that he grows taller, and his shoulders spread wider, and his frame acquires muscle. 

One day he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror that adorns the back wall of the small washroom in the balneary and realizes he must have turned sixteen this autumn. He is tall and lean like a three-year-old horse, but his skin is tight over muscle and tendons, nothing soft or idle. He stares at his reflection for some more time and tries to measure if he took after his mother or his father more. She was tall for a woman and he was tall for a man, so there is no saying here. He rotates his wrists and cracks his neck, and reckons that his bones are definitely his father’s, thick and steady bones of farmers or infantry. His parents both had dark hair, so they are even here. His eyes are nobody’s, that he had been told enough times to remember. He touches his cheekbones, contours his skull underneath his skin as if he is drawing it on his face – the single features all match those of his father, but they are somehow differently mixed into a new combination, a softer one, a chiseled one, a… more handsome one. Casavir shudders as if he had a misstep and turns away from the mirror. Vanity must be portrayed with a mirror in hand for a reason.

Rumour of a plague in the Beggar’s Nest enters the chapterhouse in the middle of that winter. First the monks and the priests talk in hushed voices about fever that cannot be brought down and blackened limbs that no healing takes, then all the priests are leaving for the city temples and the gates are locked to keep the unsworn novices from contracting the unknown disease. Then the refectory cuts down the rations and the monks who stayed in with the novices start a timeless vigil at the temple. Father Andrew returns to the chapterhouse sick and locks himself in a small wooden outhouse where hens used to be kept. He dies there a week later, and the two hermits from the monastery who showed up to bury him follow the head teacher to the grave shortly.

Casavir hears accounts of churches packed with the sick and streets where the dead lie in the open because there are not enough hands to bury them. He lies in his bed sleepless and counts the things he is lacking. His training is incomplete and should require three to four more years. His age is inadequate and believed to be the age of rash decisions that a good mentor should keep him from. Every adult he asked tells him that his time has not come yet and there will be plenty of disasters to land on his shoulders when he is older. He repeats these wise, rational arguments and they come out empty.

The following evening sees the gates open, and three riders enter the chapterhouse grounds. One of them is Lady Aribeth de Tylmarande, one of Lord Nasher Alagondar's most trusted advisors. The riders dismount and disappear in the office of the castellan. Casavir sees the horses when he returns from evening practice in the twilight, and a younger novice tells him what everybody is discussing: the paladins who teach at the chapterhouse are summoned to help in the city, all the four of them. Casavir spends an hour wandering around the refectory and making that very kind of rash decision he was warned against. He stares at the dying embers of the sunset in the west and knows that his disobedience is going to cost him something, but he will not, cannot stay behind in the safety of this place.

The massive wooden door is not locked, is not even fully closed. As he approaches, he can hear muffled voices over his own heartbeat. A ray of light from the inside cuts the gloom of the anteroom. He pulls the door; all conversation in the office dies out.

“What do you need here at this hour, novice?” the legendary paladin demands in a commanding voice, and Casavir glances at his mentor before answering. Catherine Harkenhart closes her eyes and rubs her temple tiredly. This is not quite a blessing, but this is not an outright refusal, so he lets the confident words drop off his tongue, and by their heaviness he knows this is the right decision that changes something in the fabric of the universe.

“I want to make my vows and serve out there, in the city,” he hears himself say and waits.

Aribeth de Tylmarande measures him with a look and shrugs. This is all the approval they need to set up the ceremony on the closest appropriate day.

He pronounces his vows in the frozen sunlit chapel with three monks and his mentor bearing witness to the moment. He pledges his life and service to Tyr with as little pomp as possible, for these are dark times and all decorum has been shed off the rites as an unnecessary mantle. If it were not for the plague the ceremony would be taking place in Castle Never, there would be a crowd, and Lord Nasher Alagondar, a servant of Tyr himself, would give him his blessings. Casavir appreciates the quiet ceremony so much more than the clamour of publicity: he remembers that his pride would have liked it, and he is glad that tradition is not going to feed his vanity. His chosen god accepts him in the humble ritual none the worse, and this is enough. He can feel an unfamiliar energy course through his flesh, it is peaceful and soothing, but it also rings and calls for action at times. There is also joy he does not have anyone to share with: he turned out a true follower, not an impostor, and Tyr accepted his promise as soon as it was offered.

The novices, his former fellow students, surround him before his departure and tell him they are going to pray for him. Casavir is touched by their sincere concern and thinks about them on his way to the city walls.

Not even twenty of them are going to survive the year of the Wailing Death.


	3. The Plague

Casavir learns many things.

He learns that dying people do not understand that they are dying and must be given the small grace of that ignorance. All those schoolbooks that instilled in him the simple rule ‘a paladin does not lie’ failed to mention that there are days when a paladin must lie twenty times a day, and Tyr will not strike him with his wrath, because there is no way a living being can tell the truth to a child in fever who asks if he will get better despite the black, gaping sores all over his little body.

Casavir was first ascribed to the task of tending to the dying because he is stronger than many servants of Tyr, and these people needed to be lifted to change their sheets or help them see the sky for the last time. He also carries them out when all hope is lost and their bodies are but empty shells. His back hurts at the end of his shift, but it is nothing compared to how his heart hurts. The temple is full of the dying who hoped to get help here or wanted to keep their families from the infection and the horror of their last days. This horror belongs to the temple now, and Casavir learns that a human body is fragile, that it aches and smells and produces all sorts of liquids, that the mind often lags behind in comprehending the changes the body is experiencing, that feverish people will try to rise and will hurt themselves, that he needs to keep his voice quiet and steady even if he is on the verge of tears.

Soon there are too many patients, and not enough space for them, and some of the priests at the temple die, too. Not all of them die of the plague though – the kind-hearted Father Farlon works himself into exhaustion, softens every soul with his warm smile, keeps up small talk with critical patients; Casavir brings him a jug of water as the carefree Father strokes the hair of a woman who smells of graves and cemeteries, and not for the lack of hygiene – and later that night they find Father Farlon hanging off the meat hook in the cellar. This is the first time he hears Catherine swear like an angry pirate, and Tyr does not take his grace from her either. There are human limits that their stern god understands.

The winter days are short, and the night sky has an orange shade from all the bonfires that burn on the streets. Initially many people did not believe in the plague, and now there is no ignoring it. It enters every district. The quarantined city is on the verge of an open rebellion: many citizens are eager to flee the plague-infested city, but the city guard have blocked all the gates so that the plague does not sweep through the whole coast. It makes sense to check the spread of the disease, and grateful towns send food and supplies; it is very cruel towards those healthy individuals that must stay in. Many families have locked themselves in their homes, and here and there you can see sealed windows and barred doors. Others are not that lucky – losing a job means losing the rent means losing the shelter and living on the streets where the plague reigns.

Casavir learns that even if not one of the infected has been healed, they still hope and crawl to the temples, camp around them in the piercing March wind, ask for a blessing even if they can see that the grim youngster with a beardless face is no priest. They see the symbol of Tyr on his neck and hold out their hands and ask for any acknowledgement of the simple fact that they are alive. They grab him with their shriveled, blackened hands and hold on to him until he says something – even if it is a modest “May Tyr be with you” which has next to no divine magic in it. Now that the inflow of patients overfilled the wards, the temple, the gallery and spilled into the square in front of it, Casavir is one of those who give out bread and soup once a day and water three times a day outside the temple, and every morning he carries the corpses of the unfortunate to the pyre in the church cemetery. Fenthick Moss sent him here himself when the temple decided that they would only let children and young mothers inside, and most of them weigh little, so his strength can be applied elsewhere.

Fenthick also advised Casavir to look stern and imposing so that the poor people outside let him do his work and believe he would be fair in distributing the food. Casavir can only hope his unsmiling and exhausted face can count as imposing.

Over that month, the crowd grows thinner, and Casavir realizes that it literally dies out. Death tolls continue to rise, and the city guard and militia have lost half of their forces to the plague and sporadic outbreaks of violence. The plague is contagious, and people who are in direct contact with the sick often contract it – guards, priests, traders, beggars, hookers. However, here and there one hears stories of locked houses full of dead bodies, of whole families that succumbed to the disease in complete safety and isolation. Rumours are flying, and conspiracy theories are running rampart. The fact that neither magical nor regular healing can cure the plague adds to the panic. The fact that none of the paladins at the temple have caught the disease despite continuous exposure suggests that this is no ordinary epidemic.

* * *

In April, the long winter retreats further to the North, and though the death is feasting on the city as greedily as before, the citizens grow tired of being afraid. Casavir learns that with time people can get used to anything including the stench of plague-infested bodies by their door, or the constant danger, or even death of the people they know.

The warm weather lures hesitant walkers out. Green leaves and apple blossom and nesting birds obscure the horrors around. Bakers start to bake bread again, smiths work their anvils, psychics tell the fortune, young couples sneak out into the parks, rich people even host parties and complain of the quarantine. The city is a surreal combination of contrasts, and Casavir is alarmed to notice them everywhere: two people kissing in the glow of a funeral bonfire; kittens playing with a boot of a dead man; horses in ornate livery pulling an expensive carriage – and ugly fat rats scuttling away from under their hooves. At the temple they still have no time to take a breath, but outside the citizens stopped worrying and decided to go down with a flourish, drunk and loud.

With fewer people turning to the temple for help, Casavir is assigned a different duty. He walks from house to house and picks up the dead. In the small district to the south of the temple which he patrols daily he finds ten to twenty every day. All respect has flown down the gutter, and families now dump their dead right on the side of the road, too afraid to touch them to carry them to the burning bonfires. Casavir pulls a cart, pick up the dead, hauls the cart to the bonfire site, chops communal wood left there by the city guard once a week, builds a pyre, says an appropriate prayer, and starts the fire.

At times he loses all sense of age or time or place and feels like he is not sixteen anymore – an ancient man, a man so old that there is no counting his years, and he is afraid that he is going to see these sights again many years later, that this vague apprehension is a harbinger of horrors to come.

When the numbers of the recently deceased stop scaring the population and turn into empty news, familiar and regular like the sunrise, Casavir takes it upon himself to look into the face of each corpse he burns, to spare a minute to observe whatever signs of individuality he can find, and to record his daily labour in as much detail as he can after a long day of work. A middle-aged human woman, short chestnut hair, brown eyes, rather short and petite, clad in a dark green tabard over a brown skirt, a birthmark on her left cheek, an old crescent-shaped burn mark on her right palm. A young dwarf, forty years or so, his red beard in curls, blue eyes, crooked teeth and top right canine missing, clad in leather trousers marred with tar and charcoal stains and a grey tunic with elbow-long sleeves, no obvious scars. An elderly man, bald with long grey whiskers, eye color unknown, sea-related tattoos all over his forearms, the most memorable a squid wrapping its tentacles around a coffin, poor clothes of indistinguishable colour and fashion. Casavir keeps his records in the temple library and hopes that someday in the future the dead he burns will have their names back when their relatives come looking for them and recognize them from his notes.

Yet there is life even in the middle of worst disasters, and he is a sixteen-year-old. Like green grass bursting through the pavement, smiles and little moments of mirth burst through the dire days. There are jokes and pats on the shoulder and friendly nods and thankful patients and creative curses and silly yet harmless mistakes. What is more, some people do recover, and every miracle of this sort is worth all the fatigue and labour.

* * *

In May, Lady Aribeth de Tylmarande requests healthy people of faith to be reassigned for patrolling the Beggar's Nest. Rumour has it that some of the dead rose from the streets and linger as zombies. Fenthick Moss needs all the hands he has at the temple, but he does not have the heart to outright refuse the love of his life, and they keep exchanging polite remarks – she insists, he complains – until Casavir shows up in the passageway with a load of fresh linens for the ward. It is the end of the day, he is mortally tired, and he only picked up the linens on his way because Sister Arian asked for his assistance, so he stops as if in a haze when Lady Aribeth calls for him to approach. She measures him up and he can see a flicker of recognition in her almond-shaped elven eyes, even if she does not remember his name.

“You, lad. You know how to wield a sword, and carrying baskets is not helping anyone,” she shrugs contemptuously and Casavir is too tired to disagree or explain, so he just nods to the part about swords and wielding. “We need more armed men in the streets, the Beggar’s Nest is now infested with the undead. Will you go there and fight them?”

For some reason, Casavir cannot refuse her, not when her voice is ringing and she looks stunningly fierce as if Tyr’s light surrounds her. He hears himself answer before he registers a silent ‘please no’ that is cast all over Fenthick’s honest face:

“I will, my lady”.

“Good.” Aribeth gives a triumphant look to Fenthick Moss. “Show up at the militia headquarters by the East Gate tomorrow at sunrise. Have your bag with you, you will probably move there for several weeks.”

She turns on her heel and forgets about him immediately, and Casavir takes it as a dismissal. When an hour later Catherine confronts him about his volunteering to leave the temple, he sighs and shrugs and tells her he was not really volunteering. He did not have the heart to refuse. Catherine gives him a healthy punch in the shoulder and rolls her eyes in a way that makes her twenty years younger.

“I should refuse to be your mentor, boy. Do you even remember I am supposed to advise you and keep track of your progress? Do you even try to consult me before making any decision at all? Well, don’t blame me if you die out there. May Tyr have mercy on you, stupid, silly, brainless puppy.” She is not really angry though, and Casavir takes the scolding for what it is: her unique way to apologize that during these months she as good as forgot about her apprentice. They all had other things to do.

* * *

He learns that no matter how awful everything is, it can always be worse just around the corner. The Beggar’s Nest is more like hell than part of a once prosperous city.

After some heavily moustached sergeant grumbles for a good hour that they are recruiting children now and that every piece of simple leather armour is either short or wide on his frame, Casavir is paired off with Jane, a serious middle-aged woman from the city guard and leaves for the militia's temporary headquarters in the poorest district. During the day, they patrol the streets to pick up and burn as many corpses as they can, help the survivors block the doors and ground windows, escort those who have some place to leave for. During the night, they defend the headquarters from the undead and catch some sleep in the bunk beds upstairs in between the attacks.

He learns that if nobody answers his knock at the door, it is better to break the door, for there are corpses inside. And he is lucky if the corpses are not walking. He learns to wear leather gloves at all times because rotten bodies easily disintegrate under their own weight. He also learns that the undead do not feel, even if it is a little girl clutching a remnant of a toy in her skeletal hands, but he is discomforted with killing them anyway.

One of these days he is patrolling the smaller northern side streets alone because Jane is down with something that might be the plague, but hopefully is just a fever. Later he will remember this day as a typical one: knocking on doors and asking the locals how many people are inside and if they are all alive and healthy; breaking into one lifeless house to discover two zombies loitering in the kitchen, one of them very hostile and the other completely disengaged from their fight; burning two more bodies in a bonfire. This is also the day when he meets the Hero of Neverwinter.

The said Hero is a young mage, hardly five years older than Casavir himself. He is wearing a simple brown robe, his hair is so blond and full of soot that it looks grey, and he is resting his weight against a long crooked staff wearily as he asks Casavir pointed, no-nonsense questions. A burly half-orc is looming behind the mage, his face is seemingly disinterested, but intelligent and alert. Casavir does his best to provide answers: there are more undead now than there were a week ago; they are not particularly strong; they do seem to be much more active at night; no, the paladins at the temple do not get sick, and he seems to be the only paladin on patrol duty; yes, paladins are generally immune to death magic; he did take his vows early, but these are testing times; no, he normally has a partner, but she is sick today; no, he did not see any animals in the street this week; no, he has not heard about Waterdhavian animals; yes, he has heard about the attack at the Academy. The mage gazes into his face with his most ridiculous sea-green eyes and asks about his name. His full name, he insists when Casavir touches the holy symbol on his neck and replies that he is Casavir of Tyr.

He abandoned his family name in January – with the vows. He is Casavir, simply that. Casavir of Tyr is more than enough. His family name deserved no tribute; it had a weight of its own, and what a heavy weight it was. His god deserved better than the vanity and ritualistic greed of continuity of people who hold on to their names as if they explain anything about them. For some reason, he puts it all into words for the young sharp mage, and the mage nods and introduces himself before going about his way.

This is how Casavir will know what the Hero of Neverwinter was called when the mage is banished from the city and his name is lost to intrigues and public lies and uncomfortable secrets. He will hear this name once again when the plague is over because the young mage with green eyes retrieved the cure and found out that the Helmites had been part of the cult that cursed citizens with their blessings and that Luskan was behind this epidemic. He will hear his name for several times in the war that will follow at the heels of that discovery. When people around him tell of a valiant hero, or a cynical betrayer, or a grim lunatic, Casavir will think of an angry young man with a quiet determination in his eyes and place little trust in these accounts.

* * *

In July, the undead quiet down as if the summer heat disagrees with them, and their team has more burying than fighting to do again. When heralds trot through the streets and declare that the long-awaited cure has been obtained, Casavir returns to his temple only to find it in disarray: it turns out that street preachers were lacing their blessings with curses, and when their leader went down, he took Fenthick with him. The gentle-hearted head priest is now imprisoned in Castle Never and he is going on trial for high treason.

Casavir cannot believe that the kind and selfless half-elf who took so many deaths so close to heart might be at the core of the conspiracy, and surely the judges will know that. He tries to rally the others to write a letter to the court to bear witness to what kind of person Fenthick Moss is, but nobody seems to support the idea. He writes the letter himself and offers the templars to sign it, but only Catherine and a couple of nurses do – and Catherine seems to do it out of pity rather than genuine conviction. He attempts to approach Judge Olaf and volunteer to be a witness of character at the trial; Judge Olaf keeps silent for a long time and says reluctantly that there will be no witnesses this time. Fenthick Moss confessed and pleaded guilty. Casavir is dumbfound. He works through that week in a fog and at last concludes that Fenthick must feel guilty of what happened even if he is not truly guilty in the gods' eyes. His request for an audience with the prisoner is refused, his attempts to seek Lady Aribeth are ignored. He is a sixteen-year-old boy in mismatched armour, and the world does not care for his opinion.

On the day of the trial Casavir goes to the court square – the process is public, so a podium is erected in front of the castle, and around it there is an angry, roaring sea of plague survivors. He is smothered by the crowd and he realizes with horror that everybody around him is out for blood. They loathe the poor priest on the podium, they curse his name and scream obscenities at the shaking form kneeling before the judges. Casavir cannot hear a word of what is being said, he tries pushing closer and cannot. He sees Judge Olaf stand up, raise his hands, and enquire the crowd – this must be the final question, and Casavir tears his throat raw screaming "Innocent!" at the top of his lungs.

His voice is drowned by the storm of anger around him, and several good citizens turn to him and decide to release some of their frustration and shut him up by the oldest and very satisfying way of several heavy blows into the jaw of the trouble-maker.

With a spectacular bruise on his face, Casavir returns to the temple and goes up into the dorm without a word. He does not go to the execution; he burns with grim anger as if it is some sort of fever. An innocent person was hung, a servant of justice found no justice, the one who sacrificed so much for the sake of the city was shown no mercy, and the city was greedy for his death. Casavir deals with this injustice like he deals with everything else: he buries it deep and throws himself into work and training so that his every waking moment is occupied. He tells himself that this execution is not Neverwinter, but rather its corruption by the plague, that the raw hatred he witnessed at the square was like the anger of a wounded animal who kicks and bites because it is in pain, and even if these people made this terrible mistake, they still deserve protection and justice. Whoever sent this plague is to blame for Fenthick Moss's death.

Catherine sets him fifty pages of daily reading as an extra chore. These are books he did not have access to before – thick volumes on monsters and beasts, orcs and trolls, undead creatures and fey, devils and demons: their anatomy, their advantages in combat, their weaknesses, their habits, their cultures. Everything in these books of elven origin is about killing them with as much efficiency as possible, and Casavir cannot but question whether there used to be books like that on humans and dwarves as well. He learns whole pages by heart studiously and reports his progress to Catherine once a week at dinner; she nods and dumps a fresh bucket of distantly relevant stories on him so that his education has some semblance of practicality.

* * *

In October, Luskan invades Port Llast, and a bloody war follows at the heels of the plague. Casavir tends to the wounded delivered to the temple and trains until he can barely stand. The troops march north, refugees flood the city instead, and everybody can feel a black shadow approach as the news relays defeat after defeat. The temple is now a war hospital, with hundreds of the wounded delivered here from the frontline. There are soldiers who lost a limb; there are soldiers who caught an arrow and it was easier to transport them for a full day than kill them by pulling it out on the spot; there are soldiers with wounds and burns and fractures. Most of these things could have been healed if there were an experienced healer at hand, but healers are counted by tens and soldiers by thousands, so priests in the field must assign priorities: first those who need a little magic to stay alive, then those who need a little magic to stay in the fight. Everyone beyond these two categories must die or be sent to the city. In the city, there are soon priorities assigned as well: everyone who can heal naturally should heal naturally, scars and pain and all that, and the priests will try to help as many of the others as they can.

On his name day, Casavir works well into the night. He is dizzy with hunger. He has been on his feet since last night, and somehow food has never made it into his list of immediate priorities. Every time he paused to think of it, there was another soldier in front of him whose wounds needed dressing or cleaning; leaving the hospital for something so mundane as food seemed selfish. He lies down on his narrow cot in the dorm and stares at the ceiling. He can feel his fate tighten into a knot, and here is another moment of ringing clarity that staying in the safety of the city walls will mean losing a part of what he is. People are dying out there, and he will not be able to look into the mirror and respect himself if he keeps off the worst that is happening.

He has turned seventeen, and this is the appointed minimal age for recruits, so in the morning he informs Catherine that he cannot stay behind anymore and goes to the subscription office. An old lieutenant slaps him on his shoulder, writes his name down, asks if he wants the cost of his armour deducted from his allowance, shoves a military backpack into his hands, and sends Casavir to the sanitary tent for the briefest health inspection he has ever witnessed.

In the chilly November morning of the following day, their company marches off through the northern gate.


	4. The War

Casavir’s memory plays a strange trick on him: he will remember the war as a stream of overlapping images rather than a strict timeline. He will try to structure it later for so many times that the images will fall into a semblance of a story for him to tell himself. Whenever he is asked about the war in public, he will see it as a responsibility to convey the truth, so he will pick an image from this stream and delve into its detail. When asked in private, he will give a shrug, and grunt a non-committal noise, and say the true and trite things everybody expects. It was hard, cold, long, unpleasant. Many deaths. It is good it is over.

* * *

Their initial company includes seventy soldiers divided into seven squads of ten. Casavir was one of the last to be enlisted, so he is in Squad 6; they were supposed to take four weeks of training. Their lieutenant, an unpleasant bearded man in his mid-fifties, informs them after the roll call that their training term has been reduced to two weeks. Casavir looks at the faces of the recruits around him – farmhands, shipboys, all sort of float wood off Neverwinter streets, malnourished and mostly not much older than he is – and he silently questions this decision. By the end of the day, he realizes that there are maybe ten people in the company that have ever been taught swordsmanship. By the end of the two weeks the recruits know several basic moves and positions, can put on and take off their breastplates, tassets, vambraces and helmets, can wield their longswords more or less directedly and can block very obvious attacks if warned about them. This is not enough; their sergeant knows it, their lieutenant knows it, the whole army knows it.

It is no wonder that twenty-three of the seventy soldiers die in the very first battle before Casavir even had the chance to memorize their names. Their helmets are made of a single piece of steel, so his vision is limited by a T-shaped opening in the front of it, and as a result he remembers his first battle as a series of commands bellowed by their sergeant. Run. Halt. Shields. Run. Engage. Fall back, fall back, you bastards. Arrows spill from the drab sky, people scream and fall, Casavir steps on something warm and soft, and there is no time to think what it is. He is not afraid, but only because he is so disengaged from everything he is. He came off his last hospital shift less than a month ago, and the very idea of a temple and a city seems vague and unreal to him now.

After the battle he struggles to embrace the idea that he is Casavir, a paladin of Tyr, seventeen years old. An elderly priest – a short dark-skinned woman with a piece of parchment in her hands – asks his name and whether he is injured. He shakes his head and attempts to smile at her, but his lips somehow feel wrong on his face. All the blood on him is someone else’s. They were not sent into hand to hand combat this time; they attacked a small hill, lost too many people, and retreated. His sword is pristinely clean.

He remembers that for some time after that they camp in the sad winter forest. Luskan forces do not advance, but stay their ground waiting for something, and their generals use that uneasy break to move more soldiers to this forest edge, to train them, to make more armour. They fall trees and fortify the camp, chop wood and cluster around campfires, take turns to sleep in old musty tents, stay on duty and guard the perimeter, send out patrols and learn the discipline and the subordination of this large military machine.

Casavir discovers that he does not like the company of so many men. They smoke and drink and swear and gamble while he prays and meditates and thinks. They often talk in the way that makes him burn with anger and shame. He does not take part in what they call fun, and he is not made fun of only because he is large, strong and actually good with his sword, so he also takes several softer boys under his yet unsteady wing and interrupts many confrontations before they get ugly. He learns to redirect conversations into safer topics – food and weather, mostly. It turns out that every soldier in the world will rise to the bait of complaining. It also helps to be a constant: calm, dependable, always ready to help, never taking offense, never bearing grudges, never arrogant, never riled up. There are so many sorts of people here pushed together by these unfortunate circumstances: tough lads, cocky brawlers, cowards and bullies, womanizers and mother’s boys, and in the quiet of his mind Casavir contemplates the idea that he should endure them all as he endures rain or snow or heat or cold. They are here, a given in this trial, and he has no other companions but this diverse crowd to rely on.

Before long, Luskan receives reinforcements and starts the slow but steady advance into the south, and the quiet forest edge sees much more action than they hoped for. They bite back a strip of land to lose twice as much the next day, and every hill, every rivulet, every path is given up after a fierce fight. Years later Casavir will be listening to a beautiful speech in a magnificent manor: some benevolent lord will be speaking of people who died for Neverwinter, and Casavir will think of young Dany, a smith’s son from a tiny village in the Dessarin Valley, who died for a tiny wooded dell that they surrendered to the enemy a week later; of the loud and honestly obnoxious Tarn whose head was split into two by an axe for a small nameless hillock; of the sunny beggar boy Mark who volunteered for regular meals rather than out of a noble sentiment and was gutted for a snowbound twenty-acre field in the middle of nowhere.

* * *

The first time he takes a life he wants to die himself. For weeks, he shudders when he looks at his sword. In that very first moment of extinguishing a mortal he discovers that he is not that much of a believer, that despite all the evidence like spirits and ghosts and hells he doubts the very core of his religion, the all-empowering creed that this life is not everything that exists, that the soul travels beyond this short trip in the flesh. He discovers that the tiniest chance that the person he killed will not be a soul in the gods' realm makes him so uneasy that he is on the point of laying the sword down for good. He discovers as well that at the roots of his heart lies the firm truth that death cannot be justice, but a good half of what he has been taught rotates about metal that enforces justice. Fear that enforces justice. Violence that enforces justice.

In the eyes of the other soldiers, Casavir remains his usual reliable self, a steady rock in the eye of a storm, restrained and solemn, a wordless young man always ready to pick the heaviest burden without complaint. Yet his eyes bore into his own mind day and night, for many days and nights. He extracts another truth from his own depths: in his heart he does not believe even in the comforting formula ‘May Tyr protect you’. Inwardly, he knows Tyr will protect no one unless it is some truly exceptional case. The gods have abandoned the land, and this romantic boy pledged himself to the symbol of justice while he mourns the kind of justice he may bring.

Casavir wonders if it is too late to pray to Ilmater, the symbol of mercy, and after many days spent on muddy roads, or in swamplike trenches, or in damp spring forest, he reaches a peace treaty with himself: Tyr will protect no one himself, but Casavir can be his tool. His lack of religious fervor can lie deep down, but the right and the wrong do differ, and he will try his best to distinguish between them. He will be humble, for there are things his mind struggles to comprehend, and maybe one day he will.

He takes another life, and another one; a few months later he counts these lives by dozens. He does not know their names, so he tries to remember their faces, but it is a vain effort: half of the attacks, he does not even see them under their helmets. He stops counting and prays for their souls and for forgiveness. He has no illusion he is fighting for the righteous side: the people in the enemy’s army are no worse or better than the people in their own army, they are doubts and flesh the same way he is. A war has no justice or justification, it is unjust on either side of the barricades. Honor is a peculiar concept which only works if you shut your eyes and feel guilty all the time.

* * *

The year runs in loops of short intense skirmishes and periods of terrible weather that interrupt them. Every other skirmish starts with a shower of arrows; their sergeant has bad luck to receive one in his throat and die in the ditch where the squad carries him in their hasty retreat. When the company regroups and freshly enlisted recruits join them a day later, Lieutenant Martin Stiller appoints Casavir as sergeant. He registers the silent question in the young paladin’s eyes and grumbles impatiently that judging by their deceased sergeant’s notes Casavir is the only person in their squad who is literate.

Now he is the one who should bark commands and keep the mood up and enforce the discipline, and his squad is not known to be a well-behaved one. He builds his strategy on the implication that all these brash men do not dare to pronounce: they want to live. Casavir builds his authority on this underwater desire. They should train more to stay alive; they should keep their unity to stay alive; they should have discipline to stay alive.

During the first dozen attacks he experiences an acute shame that he is pretending to have any idea of which commands lead to victory and which ones result in heavy losses. This feeling slowly dissolves into a memory as he grows more experienced. He is lucky that they are not in the meat grinder of the front but defend a periphery, and during the first month since his promotion nobody dies in his squad. Other squads in the company are not that lucky, and soon there is a rumour that he is favoured by the gods. It is slightly disconcerting, but after a profound reflection Casavir decides that he cannot be sure he is not favoured by the gods indeed, and a little faith cannot hurt the generally faithless army.

When another winter puts a natural stopper on the war action for a while and early snowstorms bind the two armies in their positions, Casavir is relieved. They needed this respite from death trailing their footprints. He sits by the campfire and thinks of those glorious books he had been reading in that other life, of chronicles and annals and exaggerated historical accounts of poets, and he struggles to match what he read then with what he has seen now.

It is painful for him to admit that he is soft. He may look stoic, but in the truth of his nights he knows that he is soft and weak. A dead bird strikes him. A broken tool gives him pause. A wounded animal, or a fish beating its tail against the cook's table, or the haunted eyes of a beggar strike him deep. He has trained his face not to reflect these feelings, he has managed to hold his bile until he is alone when he first helped at the hospital, but he sees himself for what he is: a person who is not able to stay calm inside as well as outside. He would like to be a noble hero from his books, but he is a fraud and an impostor who shakes inwardly at the sight of life flowing out of someone's body with their blood. His courage is pretense, and he deems he must learn to live with this weakness so that it does not affect his duty.

* * *

One of these December nights Casavir returns from patrol and finds that his fellow soldiers have got ale and company. A nurse he does not know is sharing a meal with them, her cheeks are flushed from the ale and the warmth, and Thomas, the merry farmer boy who Casavir deemed to be harmless, is laughing and filling her mug again. It is Casavir’s turn to sleep, but he weighs the circumstances and resolves to stay. The nurse is laughing louder and for no reason, the boys exchange excited looks, and Casavir tenses by the minute. As soon as she attempts to stand up and rocks forward, he jumps to his feet.

“I will walk you back to your tent.” He offers just as Thomas rises as well and blocks their way. Casavir adds in a cold threatening voice. “Let us pass, soldier.”

If it were not for the poison in his veins, the soldier would heed this warning, but they have no such luck. Casavir misses the first solid punch in his jaw but manages to block the worse-aimed second one. A sober man will always have advantage, so the scuffle is short, and thankfully the others stay away from it. Casavir cracks his neck ominously and leads the nurse into the night. She is delighted for some reason. Well, at least she is not scared and determined to leave the army for good and let these gross dunderheads die on their own.

Lieutenant Stiller eyes his bruise wearily when Casavir submits his report the next day, and the ever-present crease between his bushy eyebrows is deeper than usual.

“I’ve heard of your unnecessary conflict. I do try to keep women from my company for a reason, because you can’t expect your soldiers to be monks, boy,” He clears his throat and Casavir snatches the opportunity to interrupt.

“Sir, with all respect, you need to make up your mind if I am a boy or a sergeant.”

They stare at each other for a moment. Casavir waits calmly, while the lieutenant’s expression flickers between annoyance and amusement. He huffs at last and says nothing more, dismissing Casavir with a vague gesture.

* * *

When the new bunch of recruits arrive and there are three female soldiers in it – two mercenaries and a lady of uncertain age who happens to have served twenty years as a prison guard, all the three are assigned to his squad. Casavir is not sure if the lieutenant sees it as a punishment or a test and decides to take it as education.

To his relief, these three do not need the green sergeant’s protection; to his headache, these three consider a brawl to be the most effective answer to any equivocal remark. Casavir is also surprised to discover that a lot of his remarks are in fact equivocal. Helena, the older mercenary, seems to have spent her life taunting people around her to bite her sword, and Casavir often fears he is going to have less soldiers when he wakes up. At least he now has more experienced fighters to rely on, and after a month of grinding against the edges of one another, the squad leaves their petty conflicts behind.

Teamwork is greatly improved by the fact that the season of snowstorms is over, and they are thrown into the fray again. The fighting is no longer aimed at standing their ground – they are battling in order to retreat slower and give Neverwinter a few more weeks to get ready for the siege. The reason for that has the paladin’s blood running cold: Maugrim, the commander of the Luskan, has lived up to his reputation and enlisted help of forces beyond nature. They are now fighting living soldiers during the day and their once killed enemies at night. The dead they left in the north rise and march south.

If Casavir is very honest with himself, he prefers the undead to the living. Exterminating them gives him no sleepless nights. He loses a soldier to the zombies, and three more are gravely wounded over the month and taken back to the city with the wagons. Casavir sends a brief letter to the temple with one of them – alive, in the western part of the front, a sergeant now. He adds a note to Catherine Harkenhart with a small request and attaches the list of the deceased and wounded soldiers he has been keeping out of habit. He has more trust in the orderly temple archives than in the chaotic military records.

* * *

Hushed words weave into a steady confidence that Lady Aribeth de Tylmarande has lost her faith and now serves under Maugrim’s command. Casavir listens to the conversations sadly and thinks of the innocent priest who was about to wed her. Injustice begets injustice. Some green soldier who learnt to hold his sword up a week ago will be killed because last summer the crowd demanded blood. He adds her name to his daily prayers. _Mighty Tyr, let her die in battle or repent and lay down her weapon. Let this stop. Make this stop_.

He often dreams of blood soaked up by the fields, of scarlet wheat sucking the blood out of the soil, of children who bite into loaves of rust-coloured bread and smear their mouths in the blood. He wakes up exhausted and panting, a drowned man resurrected from his nightmares. A taste of grave dust lingers in his mouth. At these moments he feels a fierce love for the warm and breathing people in his tent. This war is devouring the land, the longer it lasts the more it cripples them all.

* * *

In the underskirts of Neverwinter they set up a hasty camp and start building fortifications. Other regiments march to join them from the east, and soon all the theatre will spread in the wooded plain and freeze in the wait of the final confrontation. He cannot see the city walls from here, but he can feel them behind his back, they press down on his conscience. Lieutenant Stiller now sends out whole squads to patrol, because the undead have no concept of appropriate time and meander in their general direction ahead of Maugrim’s army.

Casavir’s squad is preparing to set out for a patrol when what is left of the previous group rushes into the camp and hell breaks loose a split minute later.

The undead rush into the camp as if they are driven. They slash at the living with unusual purpose, but the fires were already burning bright, and the first wave is pushed back without much loss. The second wave is larger, but everybody is alert now, and it is fended off as well. They are waiting for the third wave, but it does not come; some sergeant swears impatiently when Casavir freezes and registers that something is very wrong. There is no breath of air, no blade of grass moves, and every night bird has fallen silent. He peers into the dark intently and a thought flashes across his mind that he is seeing green ghosts of sparks from their torches. He looks around, and nobody seems to notice them, but some deadly weight presses down on his shoulders, and a spell of panic grips his heart. He knows these sparks, he had read about them ages ago, before the war and the plague and the chapterhouse.

“Fall back! Fall back! This is death magic!” He did not even know his voice can roll and rumble like that, and his squad steps back immediately, trained to trust and then question. His command is chorused by other voices, but the green sparks are swirling too close. Several soldiers are engulfed by them. As they fall to their knees and start choking, Casavir makes a sign against evil and utters a quick prayer. He is supposed to be immune. _Thy hand will strike true, for I name you the paladin of Tyr_ , a distant voice echoes in his soul, and though a sticky fear makes his knees weak he grips his sword harder, raises his shield and takes a determined step forward. He can sense eyes drilling a hole in his back, but he concentrates on moving forward and forgets where he is.

The green sparks have a pattern and a source, they flare out from a point beyond his vision, but he can trace them. Death magic reeks of everything he hates. Blood, rust, pus, mud, mold, rotting leaves and decaying flesh. The hostile sensation intensifies as he moves. It leads him to its source; it is a mortal man. A necromancer in a deep black robe covered in embroidered symbols, some two dozen undead behind him.

The necromancer raises his simple wooden staff and green sparks swarm so thickly that the air grows solid. The tension coils and Casavir can feel his limbs grow heavy. He is moving through the spell slowly as green sparks try to eat through his resolve. I am not yours, he thinks suddenly, and imagines that his faith is a cloak hanging off his shoulders. Another step, and one more. The necromancer rocks back slightly and opts for a safer choice of running before it is too late. As soon as his focus wavers, the spell loses its grip and traction, and Casavir advances into action. He is at the necromancer’s heels before the man turned back, and his sword cuts deep in between the ribs under the black attire.

The spell bursts and dies out, and Casavir looks back to assess the distance. He has no chance against two dozen skeletons, but he can see the camp behind him – the distance he covered was hardly seventy yards, it only felt longer. He raises his fist in a signal for help, and jerks back from under the sable of a skeleton. He parries another blow, sinks to evade the next one and suddenly his fellows are around him, and his death is again delayed for an undetermined term.

He had never been at the centre of so much attention before. Everyone, literally everyone tries to have a word with him, pat his shoulder, praise him, celebrate his luck that they call courage. Casavir is at a loss why they do not think he is a freak and do not shy away from him. He has seen before how people distrust the divine and the arcane equally. Over the following days he arrives at the conclusion that it is because they rescued him from the skeletons and therefore had a part to take in their joined success. The soldiers brag to the other companies that they have a paladin of Tyr with them. Lieutenant Stiller smiles at him. Two priests of Tyr from the medical train show up at their campfire to get acquainted with him, and the mood in their camp is so light it makes Casavir ache. He would prefer them all to be focused and watching every shadow, for they all were a hair’s width away from death and there may be more necromancers out there, but he listens to the conversations and relents. They did need a little hope beyond all these defeats and disasters.

They do not have a single day to celebrate though. Dark tents of their enemy can be seen in the distance. The very next evening there are more undead roaming through the plain, and Lieutenant Stiller with two other soldiers come under attack while they return from the Commander’s post. He is carried back to the camp, and one look at his torn side and shoulder tells Casavir the lieutenant is a dead man. They try to stop the wound as he keeps gasping news and curses at them; by the time a healer arrives the old man has already bled to death. The sergeants exchange a grim look and reach an understanding. They walk away to their squads and set tasks to keep them busy. Idleness is key to low spirits, and the message the late lieutenant was carrying demands all their attention.

  
The great battle is approaching.

* * *

On the drizzly morning before it Casavir is summoned to the Commander. A messenger arrived with a second horse in tow, and Casavir strokes the noble animal’s neck. He has had enough time to forget the earthy smell of horse sweat, and it grounds him in the way he could not expect. They trot across the messed field to the centre of the camp. There is chaos of thousands of people around them and lines of Graycloaks can be seen marching down the road from the city. They approach the Commander’s tent. Inside, there is an exotic-looking man in leathers, a knight with regal bearing who must be Lord Nasher Alagondar and that young mage with green eyes Casavir remembers from the Beggar’s Nest. The young mage looks… tired, for the lack of a better word. Battered, worn out, washed out, as if a heavy burden is bending his shoulders with its weight. Casavir has a fleeting desire to talk to him, but the mage turns away and the knight starts speaking.

“Casavir, right. Here are your papers, your company will be part of the vanguard, so report to Callum immediately.” He talks as he looks through his notes in a checked, heavy voice. “Questions?”

Casavir takes a look at the papers and decides against asking why he is appointed a lieutenant when he has next to no experience in commanding anyone other than himself. He shakes his head, and the Commander dismisses him with a nod.

Callum turns out to be General Callum, an extremely broad-shouldered dwarf in what must be three stones of a full metal plate. The general has little patience, but Casavir still asks him a good dozen quick questions about tomorrow’s battle, and the dwarf orders Casavir to join him on his round of the troops for an hour so that the freshly baked officer meets the other lieutenants (‘and sees what they do’ is implied). Casavir has eyes and ears. He sees that the lieutenants in the vanguard host are mature and long-serving. He hears that they talk to their sergeants like nobility talks to common folk. He knows he has neither the experience nor the demeanor for it. He knows Callum steals glances at him. His insides tighten into a heavy knot. He is going to fail them all. Callum obviously sees him go pale at the thought and slaps him on the shoulder.

“Easy, lad. Your task is to tell your sergeants what to do before the action, keep track of the horns and fight. It is not much strategy tomorrow, and you will have time to master the art of management and provision later. Tomorrow is the good old getting them before they get you.”

“Why?” Casavir utters the word before he knows it, and Callum waits for him to continue. “I am not… I do not… I am a soldier, not an officer. The necromancer was a gut choice, nothing more.”

“The necromancer? Huh. Stiller had you listed as his successor for a good month, if not more. The old barrel could have given you a hint.” Callum shrugs and sends Casavir on his way. There is a lot to be done before the next morning.

* * *

Casavir remembers that day in a blur: announcements, news, preparations, a few hours of shaky sleep. He most certainly appointed someone a sergeant for his squad, but he does not remember the name. They definitely sealed the camp in the morning and marched into order, but these hours seem to be fogged. He remembers conducting the roll call and assigning front, rear and sideline positions to the squads – with the full clarity that the vanguard will be hit by the enemy’s cavalry, and they must hold the lines or everyone in the company dies. He has a vague image of his squad chanting something and the company picking up the chant while they were waiting for the sun to rise.

Everything else is mercifully wiped off his memory. He had been wrong thinking that everyone in the company dies; next to everyone in the vanguard dies that day. There is smoke, horses neigh and die, people scream and die, arrows pin people to the ground, a mercenary army cuts through their lines and melts under their swords, taking so many down with them. One regiment around him falls and another arrives from behind his back, and Casavir does not see any familiar faces around anymore – only death and blood and enemies running at him. Everyone dies and he must be either blessed or cursed, but he is standing to meet the new wave over and over again.

His body hurts under the weight of armour – he is tired and bruised all over. He hurls his sword up and throws all the force he can muster into one cleaving blow after another. The battle lasts and lasts and gradually the field clears. There are less voices around and more death under his feet. The ground soaked up enough rain yesterday, and it is not thirsty for blood now – it flows over and pools in the mud. Casavir has lost his helmet, and his shield was so threadbare from all the metal it engaged that he threw it away and uses his left vambrace for an illusion of protection. It has deep dents. He did not move forward for what feels like hours – and they keep coming at him.

He hears a warning call on his right, evades one blade nearly, and then misses his step, and hears a painful crack, and suddenly the ground jumps at him and then away, and he is on his back, the stormy sky spreading wide above. It is heavy with rain, so grey and close that Casavir tries to touch it, but his hand misses it, shakes in the air, leans strangely beyond his will. _I fell_ , the thought flashes across his mind and he drops his hand helplessly. Something flows down his right temple, and he has seen enough carnage to know it must be blood.

The sky blurs and comes into focus again, vomit rises in his throat, and panic shots through him a split second before everything goes dark.


	5. The Temple

His dreams are disturbing. He climbs countless crumbling stairs and they disintegrate under his feet, so he must pull himself out of the fall into a putrid-smelling abyss deep below. He is lost in a cavernous labyrinth, and he keeps hitting the same dead end for a thousand times. He looks down at his feet and sees that grass grows from them and through them, and the grass roots spread and bury him until his sight is blocked by the turf that grows over his face. _I’m having a fever_ , he makes a guess when the three dreams are repeated in another succession, _I need to wake up_.

When the nightmares finally spit him out, he stares at the dimply lit figures of the Triad on the dome above his bed. A vague recognition glimmers through his stupour. It is the main hall of the city temple. His surroundings take flesh slowly – he absorbs the muffled sounds of the hospital, the sharp smells of willow bark and soaked lint. His gaze travels from the soft glow of tall candles in their glass cases to the darkened stained glass windows in the portal on his left. It seems to be late evening. He focuses on the sensations in his body: his head hurts, his ribs ache when he inhales, his limbs feel rusty and heavy. He is naked and covered with a thin white sheet. This fact honestly gives him the greatest discomfort as a passing nurse notices he is awake and a minute later the loud and elated Catherine Harkenhart plops down on his bed unceremoniously and snaps her fingers a few inches from his face.

“Awake at last! Glad to see you, Casavir of Tyr. The way you looked three days ago I thought I will never have the chance to tell you what I think of your stunt with the necromancer.” Casavir stares into her cherry-coloured eyes and realizes he is very happy she is alive, too. “You took a blow to your head and a spear in your back, and I am justified to say that your stubbornness probably takes its root in that extremely thick skull of yours. Now that you must be the youngest lieutenant in all modern history and I am still a stupid old mentor, tell me, child: was it worth it to leave your education and service for the army? What did you learn there?”

Casavir starts to speak and chokes on his words. He tries to tell her that he has learnt how people bleed to death in the sludge of a battlefield for hours because they were cut off their troops. He has learned that he is a coward and he cries when a horse with a broken leg struggles to get up and they can hear more and more bones crack. He has learnt to live in the routine when every week there are new people on your team, and they inherit the seats and the tents of the _dead men_. He has learnt to see every meadow as a burial ground. He has learnt to be the evil and bring death upon people who did not deserve it. He has learnt to strike a killing blow by accident and to strike a killing blow as a mercy and to strike a killing blow to kill. He takes a gasping breath, tries to wipe his sweat off and can feel his fingers shake. Catherine watches him silently and strokes his head.

“Easy. I know, I know. Learnt a lot, none of it good. It’s over.” Her voice takes a tranquil ring as if she is telling him a fairy tale. “We are safe. Luskan is defeated. Lord Nasher had been keeping the more experienced regiments in reserve. When the central line of defence was breached and their infantry approached the walls, we tore into their flanks while the Many-Starred Cloaks showered spells on them from the ramparts. The Hero of Neverwinter used the initial distraction to get to their commanders. He killed Maugrim and convinced Aribeth to surrender. With the infantry erased and the generals absent, their lower officer ranks decided to make peace. It is over.”

Casavir digests the story slowly. There are too many things he does not like at all. He averts his gaze to conceal his treasonous thoughts, and Catherine follows his eyes to the blackened windows. She huffs.

“The Luskan dogs did manage to set several buildings in the docks on fire. It caught well and spread fast. I am afraid half the city has been burned, but all the stone buildings are standing. The temple dormitories are gone. When you recover, you can stay here at the temple. Tyr knows we have a lot to do, but it is over, Casavir. It is finally over.”

* * *

Another spring spreads its wings wide, and Casavir pauses now and then and takes a deep breath of the fresh wind with a mixed feeling of relief and shame. Like ants, people rearrange their district into a more habitable one by the day. There is a steady smell of wood and sawdust in the air, construction sites are at every corner, and though one can see gaping spaces and charred ruins everywhere, the city heals. There is work for all hands. There is life in the markets. The plague is water under the bridge, the war is a bridge that has been washed away: it causes a lot of inconvenience, but reconstruction is on the way, and there is hope.

Yet Casavir imagines that he sees some invisible lines in the air that tie innocent daily things to their macabre backgrounds. He walks by a skeleton of a new house and sees four women pulling support beams up and sawing planks into two, and he thinks of their fathers, husbands and sons who stayed nameless in mass graves in the north. He sees a junkman selling old frames and thinks of the portraits ripped out of them because the plague and the war left no one in some poor family.

He buys several yellow tulips at the corner and has no idea why he suddenly craved them so terribly. Their sunshine petals with specks of pearly white are so fragile. They are going to last for a couple of days at best. Casavir carries them carefully into the temple and has no heart to leave them in the gloomy candle-lit nave, so he puts them in a jug in his room and watches them welcome the morning sun when he wakes up. He tries not to think what they might symbolize when they fade and the water acquires that slightly putrid smell of rotten stems.

He has been written off as missing in action, so he shows up at the temporary command point and submits his report and records. He has spent a good week trying to list everyone he could remember and pay at least a paragraph to their fate, and then a week more to copy it for the archives. At the command point they give him a parchment with names and he recognizes the last roll call he sent with a messenger that morning. The seventy-two names and his own signature stare at him from the wrinkled page. He is told to cross out the names of those he has seen die with his own eyes and tick off the names of those whom he knows to be in the hospital. His hand trembles as if he is killing them. He receives his final allowance, shakes his head when he is asked if he has any weapons or armour from the armoury, nods at the question if his armour was paid for. The clerk’s eyes travel to the holy symbol on his neck and soften. They exchange hollow blessings and Casavir leaves. He rakes his hands through his hair and tries to shake off the stupour that strangles him.

* * *

He starts to train with Catherine and the others again. He takes up his studies diligently, reads and learns what is required. He is slightly older than the other apprentices from the chapterhouse, and he is disconcerted when the priests and the monks fall back into the habit of treating him like a boy. He feels nothing like a boy. If anything, he feels old and out of place in this beautiful temple school where most concerns are examinations and rites of passage.

Catherine tells him that he should embrace the years that the plague had robbed him of. She also insists that he needs to complete a full apprenticeship step by step without haste, and he agrees with her, but again for vastly different reasons. She believes that as a young, promising, and talented paladin he needs to be better equipped with knowledge. He is sure that he does not deserve to be a beacon of virtue to others because he has failed so many people and they all rest in cold graves now.

He has run through that last battle in his mind for hundreds of times, and he is convinced that there was nothing he could do save deserting and leading his company away from the battle – they were positioned that way to bear the brunt of the attack, the superior forces of the enemy swallowed the bait and mowed through them and his survival was a mere coincidence. He should have died in that field like every single one of those seventy-two people he oversaw. That is why Catherine’s kind words fall dead on his ears. Casavir needs to study more not because he does not know enough history or because he applies his feeble divine magic intuitively and with little use, but because he needs to figure out an impossible thing: how to lead an army and not treat soldiers like numbers on paper.

He trains in the mornings, studies before noon, works on the reconstruction of the monastery in the afternoon and walks back to the temple after sunset. For some reason he needs little sleep now, so at night he reads and reads at length and realizes he needs to get back to the texts he had mastered before. The old chronicles shifted their meanings; the familiar stories cracked like mountains in an earthquake and laid bare everything that they omitted. Casavir walks through their plots like an archaeologist in a necropolis: his attention stumbles upon the nameless losses, the forgotten people, the lives extinguished without a trace. He looks at his favourite story and sees that the hero he was so enchanted with in his adolescence had murdered hundreds and was celebrated for it. He sees the gaping space where individual fates were woven into a tapestry and were neglected to be mentioned collectively.

It hurts him to see that the recent war is already a story of one plot against the dim background, and the plot is painted all wrong. Lady Aribeth is in prison, in the very same cell where Fenthick Moss was contained, and nobody quite knows what to do with her – she has repented, and the Hero of Neverwinter vouches for her and insists on her exile, but the trial extends for over a year. After his work and errands Casavir goes to taverns to stare into an untouched tankard and learn what his city is. People speak of her betrayal as if they have always hated the fierce half-elf. They take tiny pieces of the past and reassemble them into a story of a haughty elven woman (they use a different word, of course) who was in league with her traitor lover (they use a different word here as well) to destroy the city and pretended to repent in order to live. Bards sing songs of her promiscuity and cruelty and drag her name through all the mud of traditional couplets.

When somebody leaks parts of her diary from the court materials, they take root in this mud and bloom into the public opinion that she deserves a shameful death. Neither words nor fists can convince anyone, and as soon as they see he is a paladin his argument is lost. In their eyes, he becomes an accomplice and object of hatred by proxy.

* * *

The army dissolves in the peaceful towns and villages gradually, but there are too many people who know how to use a weapon now, and not all of them are law-abiding servants of Tyr. It hurts Casavir to see gang members in the gallows and notice that they were soldiers recently. It is dangerous to walk alone after dark now; he is attacked every single week and the fact that he is a tall and broad-shouldered man with a sword does not help at all.

Casavir likes his night walks. The city quiets down and smells different, the dirt and gloom of the streets looks almost magical. If he crosses the way of some rascals, he does not mind: better him than any other citizen. If he chooses shadier and more secluded routes to the temple, he fails to acknowledge it even to himself. There is a night when he is jumped by three bandits, and yet he is the only person to leave that alley that night. The priests at the temple gape at his bandaged shoulder the next day but say nothing.

Catherine is awarded a medal for the Battle of Neverwinter. She brings it to the temple and does not know where to put it. They are paladins, they do not own things like houses, chests, and shelves. Sending it to the smithy seems wrong, a sign that she is somehow ashamed of it, she tells him after their joint evening prayers and sighs. Casavir reads her body language and realizes she is indeed ashamed of it. It puzzles him for a while until he finally gets it from the way she tries to downplay its importance in his presence: Catherine believes he deserved a medal as well, and he does not know how he can start this conversation and tell her she is wrong about him. She returned from the battle with her small crew unscathed, her leadership protected them. He lost all his company, so a medal is the last thing he deserves.

They never have this conversation.

* * *

Aribeth’s trial – she is stripped of her title before it, so it is the ordinary court and not Lord Nasher Alagondar judging her – draws closer, and Casavir notices that the songs and drunken stories change their course. First, they tell of her evil charms and that the innocent young Hero of Neverwinter has been tempted by her and stayed true, and then ‘what ifs’ appear and lead the rumours into saucy, seedy waters of speculations. Casavir hoped that by the final round of the trial the green-eyed mage’s influence and reputation would save her life and the vicious circle of evil would be broken, but his reputation weighs less and less as gossip bites off chunks of it and paints the hero weak, his courage into madness, his mercy into trivial lust.

By the time Aribeth is hanged and the Hero of Neverwinter exiled, Casavir is in such black despair that he does not expect anything good to come out of his life or work. The houses they build will be dwelt by terrible men who will beat their wives and children, the streets they clean will be red with blood and filthy with crime before long, every little good thing will wane and vanish, and every evil ever done will spread and spawn. He tells himself this feeling must be inside him and it shall pass, but he sees no end of it.

He throws himself into training with abandon so that he has no time to stay alone with his murky thoughts. Even Catherine notices something is wrong with him, but her sunshine personality is quick to be satisfied with dozed truths like ‘I am tired’ and ‘the wound hurts a little’. Catherine pauses to think, her creative mind takes another somersault, and she advises him to fall in love. He is embarrassed, so she says with an impatient shrug that their vows never included celibacy. As long as his trysts are consensual, he will not fall from Tyr’s grace. Casavir is speechless and Catherine rolls her eyes patronizingly and reminds him he can also marry if he wishes to. Of course, a favoured union would be with a person of faith, but it has never been an iron-cast condition.

Casavir flees from her and takes some time to consider her advice. She believes he is concerned with violating norms or falling from the gods’ grace, but she is wrong again. _It is not her fault_ , Casavir judges – he is determined to conceal whatever is brewing in his heart, and no seer can look at him and extract all his truths from their shell. Catherine means well, and he is obliged to keep counsel with himself and accept or discard her advice for a reason.

He knows he can follow it. Many women give him long looks and hopeful smiles, and the shortage of men after… the war pushes many kind hearts into a desperate search of a partner. He is not… averse to the concept, he has blood; it does run fast at times. He is averse to the idea of using a woman as a medicine. If he has this emptiness in his soul and heart, of course it may be beneficial for him to fill it with someone’s care and tender words and small signs of affection he sometimes imagines a taste of. But it will not be fair to that person. It will not be fair to receive without an adamant sureness he can give as well. If he can be whole again, he must recover on his own. If he fails, he must not drag another soul down with him. He is lost, but he is alive.

All people around are human, they forget and believe they have always been themselves, and he seems to be the only one who carries every version of his past self and lives three people’s lives at once – a borrowed child, a novice full of silly illusions and a soldier who never returned from the war. He just needs to cultivate another Casavir around these three – a loyal, steady, reliable, boring, straightforward man. The kind of man who makes a place safe by his presence. The kind of man who makes decisions without questioning everything he knows. The kind of man who does what he can and is satisfied with small victories.

* * *

When he turns twenty-two and sets off for his first temple quest, this kind of man is constructed. He travels from town to town and lets people’s needs guide his course – a letter to be delivered, a pack of wolves to be hunted down, a group of bandits to be confronted on the high road, a cemetery to be cleansed of the restless dead, a missing boy to be found, an old nun to be escorted, a donation to be guarded on the way. He roams the land, walks the paths, sails down rivers, crosses mountain ranges. He sleeps in the open, in a tent, in the back of a wagon, in a rundown tavern, on the floor of a small forest chapel, in the house of a fellow priest.

Here and there he meets people whose destination is Neverwinter, and when he has a chance, he sends letters to his mentor – alive, in this place, saw these things, learnt this lesson. He does not only fight but also prevents bloodsheds. He speaks just words and believes them. He encounters hundreds of people and kindles back the warm appreciation of their daily lives. If they ask him whether he has fought in the war, he answers honestly.

For many years he will dread these conversations most of all. A crone, or a teenager, or a grey-haired man will approach him and ask if he knew their child, or friend, or father. Most of the time he will have no knowledge of that person, but sometimes they will say a name he knows, and then they will ask something worse. Something straight which he must answer straight. If he is lucky, they will ask a question along the lines of “Did he die a hero?”, and he will be able to confirm that. All people who died there were heroes, if not in the way of courage than in the way of martyrdom.  
However, at times they will ask him “Was his death quick?” or “Did he die with dignity?”, and he will have to say no, because there were very few quick deaths and there was no dignity at all in this long war of lost battles. All the time he will notice this fleeting thought in the eyes of the strangers, this accusing look that usually will turn into a slightly ashamed echo in his own mind – _why did you survive? How are they dead and you are not?_

* * *

The tide of the great sea of human troubles carries him for a winter, a spring, a summer, an autumn and a winter again. His turmoil grows placid and his conviction strong. His faith takes shape and lends him an air of confidence. He grows appreciative of the nature’s beauty and the small trails of unseen human history fascinate him once again. In this second spring of his trip, he even feels some bud burst in his chest and starts humming a rhythm which later takes words and accompanies him as a poem on his way.

When his peace is forged and a passing errand sends him to Neverwinter, he decides it is time to renew his vows and tell his mentor he has found his own path. He travels north and enters the city with a serene heart. With a sad tenderness he passes by a monastery on the hill, walks up the paved streets, drinks spring water from a fountain in a small square. His attention is caught by a large apple tree in full blossom, and he contemplates it as a thing of ultimate beauty until ghosts of his memory fill the square and he knows he has seen the fountain and the apple tree before. He turns to look at a small side street that leads to a house with a little garden and two windows over the shop.

Casavir closes his eyes and accepts his fate. He does not want to know if they survived or the plague had taken them, or the war had driven them away. He is not one of them anymore. He is a paladin of Tyr. The priests are his fathers and mothers, all servants of Tyr are his brothers and sisters, and Catherine is more of a family than most people ever have.

He walks to the temple and is welcomed with warmth, but his mentor is nowhere to be found. He is given his own letters tied by a brown string – unopened. Catherine Harkenhart set off for a mission in Neverwinter Wood eight months ago, and never returned.


	6. The Neverwinter Wood

The entrance to the catacombs is a gaping hole in the rock, and Casavir closes his eyes in a short prayer before he ignites his torch and enters. Inside, there is debris and a scorched circle of a campfire. Daylight stays at the threshold as if afraid to follow the paladin.

Casavir looks around the cavelike anteroom, searching for any signs of recent intrusion, but the remains of the camp look like they can be six months or sixty years old. The rocky ground remembers no footprints, so he takes a deep breath and descends into the deeper passages.

Catherine must have had either a lot of courage or no brains to go here alone to find out whatever restless souls provided the undead visitors to the desolate timber mill nearby. Several manufacturers united their efforts to set it to work again, for there is a convenient river to float the logs down. The unexpected guests ruined their work, and they called for a paladin. Casavir has a better reason to enter – he is looking for a specific person who was swallowed by this place six months ago. So far, he had followed his mentor to Thundertree, then seven days up the river through the virgin forest, and then here, into the place that gives him a chill.

Every instinct of his screams that he should not be here. The burial site of an old civilization is hosted by the mines of an ancient one, and Casavir sees how rows of tombs were added to the high alcoves left by some people more sophisticated than the ones that followed. The air is stale, and the torch burns dim. Shadows creep in the corners and the darkness itself seems to contemplate the intruder that checks every nook, leaves chalk marks on the turnings, and dares to bring light with him.

Casavir suddenly feels very insecure, his knees go weak and he draws his sword almost instinctively. A second later the tombs on his right rattle and a skeleton in a rusty coat of mail lunges at him with no success. Two more excavate themselves from their graves as the fight comes to its end. Casavir drops his backpack and chants a divine spell that makes his aura flare around him and give him the courage he does not feel. He can do it; he was born and taught to fight these unholy creatures.

The mines wind deeper and deeper into the ground. There are larger rooms and low-ceilinged halls with ugly statues that make his flesh crawl. He must have travelled for many hours: his limbs burn and his eyes itch with invisible sand. He detests the idea of sleeping in these pitch-black bowels, but there is no turning back now, so he chooses a small unspecific room with a relatively sturdy door that opens in, searches it thoroughly and barricades the entrance with a couple of empty iron chests. He measures the wood he carried with him and resolves to sleep with a barely burning torch. He cannot wake up to this suffocating darkness. He discards the most uncomfortable parts of his armour, chews some dried meat and stale bread slowly and lies back.

He reasons with himself that he must sleep to be able to fight tomorrow, and descends into a shaky, troubled dream on the brink of a nightmare he often sees when he is not safe. In the dream, he is walking through an overgrown bog, and the ground sucks at his feet greedily, so he has to pull forward with effort; he is following a dark-haired girl in her teens who treads light and runs along as if the bog does not exist. Now and then she looks back and he is spurred on by her regal, serious expression. Casavir never gets to the end of the dream – the bog shakes and goes up in a mist, he is pulled back to the surface of his mind, and he is always haunted by the echoes of this fruitless chase.

This time is no different, and Casavir wakes up with a gasp. The flickering torch is dying, and he lights another one hastily. It is time to move on.

* * *

After the second night in the catacombs Casavir makes a full circle of the deeper tunnels and he is almost relieved when the torchlight reflects off his own chalk marks on the wall. The darkness behind him seems all the more hostile. He came across two more undead today, they put up quite a fight, and otherwise the day was calm – but the presence of an evil force is pressing down on him. He has missed something, so Casavir steels himself for another circle. He has torches and food for three more days, and more outside the catacombs.

This time he moves faster along the tunnels but inspects every little corner for hidden doors and disguised passages. His unease grows and Casavir stands still for a while listening for any obscure sound. The silence of the caves is not as deadly as he had expected: there are falling drops of water far in the distance, some bugs screech under his feet, the fire cracks at his movement, and Casavir can hear his own breath and his own heartbeat. There is a black shadow pulling at his core of divine strength. He can hear it hiss in annoyance when its tendrils touch upon him. Casavir has never been good at magic, but he knows the basics well. Anyone probing your heart with dark magic is a threat. He makes several wary steps, and the dark presence stays with him. He follows it like a thread and in about two hundred steps it leads him to a room he had seen before: a small square hall with remains of a carpet in its middle. Casavir worries the decrepit threads with his sword, and the blade clings on steel. There is a trapdoor underneath. Its heavy lid gives in reluctantly.

Casavir contemplates the unpolished stone steps descending into the darkness and every nerve of his screams against following them.

Of course, he does.

* * *

On this level, the damp earth swallows his steps, and his torch burns dimmer. The roughly cut corridor winds forward, and the air grows thicker as he proceeds. The corridor opens into a large chamber, larger than anything he has seen here, and he barely registers that the place looks much more habitable – there are stone shelves full of pale parchments – before a gust of wind extinguishes his torch and Casavir is left in complete darkness.

He has the presence of his mind to whisper a spell he has been saving. He strokes the blade of his sword, and the blade thrums to life. It starts to glimmer softly, and in this glimmer the paladin sees two bright red lights come to life in empty sockets of a skull. The red is reflected off the polished bones and the gilded embroidery on the tattered mantle of a skeleton.

There is a lich in the catacombs. Catherine Harkenhart has been taken down by a lich, and Casavir is about to follow, because the lich strikes its staff on the ground and hot orange fire streams off his extended hand. Casavir jerks back, feels the smell of singed leather and hopes it is not his skin. The few parchments on the shelves catch fire and make the lich pause. Everything Casavir knows about liches flashes across his mind and he jumps forward just as he realizes that his only chance lies in close combat. If the undead mage unleashes any other spells, he is dead.

Their fight is a whirlpool of blows that bite the air: the lich melts away from every attack, and though the monster is too preoccupied to cast, Casavir knows that he will inevitably tire while his opponent can go on for centuries. Three or four times he is fast enough to land a hit, but it does not do any damage. Five or six times he is not fast enough, and the lich lands a hit, and it hurts. Sweat is rolling down his face, he is already short of breath, and in a moment of despair Casavir decides to risk everything. He drops his shield and opens up, and the lich seizes the opportunity to land a crushing blow on his shoulder. Just at that moment Casavir strains the other arm and swings his sword to cut the backbone of the skeleton at its waist.

He stands on his knees by the heap of bones and fabric and takes panicked gasps of air. His left collarbone is broken and maybe worse. The pain catches up with him, and Casavir gives a hiss mixed with a whimper. He can barely move his arm, but not much blood is streaming down it, so he concludes it can wait. He runs his sword into the ground and uses it as a crutch to stand up. He finds his torch, lights it again, sheathes his sword and starts looking for the phylactery. This is the most pressing business, for if the lich keeps a spare skeleton close to it, Casavir is about to become the next backup corpse.

* * *

He has searched the three adjacent rooms when he hears a groan from the fourth one and his spirit sinks. He rushes to that room best as he can but stops at the threshold in utter astonishment.  
There is no regenerated lich waiting for him here. Instead, Catherine is tied to a cold stone altar. Behind it, there is a gleaming golden box on a high pedestal. His mentor is alive, skeletally thin, and very pregnant. She turns her head to him and recognition sparkles in her large eyes. Casavir limps around the altar ungracefully, tugs at her strange thrumming tethers and raises his gaze to follow the strings to the phylactery. Catherine braces herself, closes her eyes, and Casavir pushes the lid open with the tip of the torch. The incantations inside the box are written on sheepskin; it wrinkles and smokes and burns. There is one less lich in the world now.

"Hello, Casavir of Tyr," Catherine sits up and rubs her wrists. "You can't imagine how glad I am to see you".

Casavir is so exhausted that he sticks the torch into a holder on the wall and drops to the altar next to her.

“Hello, Catherine of Tyr,” he echoes in a small voice and fumbles with the strap of his leather pauldron blindly. Catherine assesses the situation, peels the soaked piece off and frees his shoulder from the fabric carefully. She raises her eyebrows worriedly.

“You took quite a hit. The bone is smashed, the tendon is ruined, flesh and skin… you get it.”

Casavir takes a deep breath and runs his gaze along her figure.

“Are you wounded or in need of healing? I have my daily prayer left untouched.”

“You need it more.” Catherine shrugs and he can see her bones move under her tunic. He nods and collects his thoughts for a minute. She watches his fingers dive into the torn flesh and grip the shards of the bones. He blanches as he starts to chant the prayer that they all know very well. In several minutes, his shoulder is an ordinary wound: the bone is one piece again and the tendon is whole.

“You have come a long way, Casavir,” Catherine measures him with a proud glint in her eyes. “Twenty-two, and already you heal your own fractures and take on an ancient lich.”

“It was luck,” he replies. “I was weaker. It had all the advantage. How did you survive?”

* * *

Catherine tells him the story in bits and pieces as they walk upstairs and back to the entrance. She was disarmed and prepared to face death, but the creature stunned her, and she woke up in the altar room. The undead mage kept her alive and leaked force from her for months. She was under impression it waited for the baby to arrive. Many dark rituals include a sacrifice of a newborn. They are both silent for a long time after that. Casavir thinks of the six months she has spent here and his hands ball into fists on their own accord.

They are both tired, but they do not stop for the nine hours it takes them to get out of this horrible place. He unties the rope that held his supplies high in the tree, they set camp by the river and reason to stay here for a full day so that he can recover a little. There is no way he can carry all the weight with his shoulder in such a mess.

They take turns to sleep. Catherine is relieved to bathe for the first time this year. They make fish soup, rest, eat, rest more. Casavir is not much of a talker, but Catherine pulls an account of his temple quest out of him word by word. It is peaceful on the high bank of the forest river now that the evil that was poisoning the land is dead again, but Casavir is anxious to set off. He steals glances at Catherine’s swollen belly, and if his guess is correct, she is due soon. The way up the river has taken him seven days, and now they are slower.

For three days, they slog through the summer forest and every next league takes them longer. In the afternoon of the third day, it starts to rain – it is not a downpour, but a dull continuous drizzle than turns the path into mud. They make a halt early, spread the tent under two thicker firs, and Catherine sets down to the task of making a fire. Casavir goes up the hill to assess where they are. He pauses to stare at the overcast sky in the clearing. If the weather stays, it will take them a week to get back to Thundertree.

Back at the camp, Catherine wails as if she is gutted and Casavir's knees go weak. They are not going to have that week.

* * *

The baby does not like the world, the world does not like the baby.

"I did not know at the time I subscribed for this. If I had known I was with child, I would have made different decisions. If I had known this was not an ordinary case of some undead under the cemetery, I would have acted differently.” Catherine’s voice is still rough from all that screaming. She insisted they move on after a night’s rest. So here they are: a foolish young man with too much load for his back, a deadly pale woman who bandages a vacated bag of skin to her stomach and wills her legs to walk, and a small red baby who is not strong enough to whine.

“However, I was with child and this was a lich, so I was stupid enough to be captured and kept here as a blood source for his rituals, arrgh. So yeah, dear student of mine, your mighty mentor made all the silliest mistakes by the book. I don't even mention the misjudged impulsive actions that have led to this child being conceived."

Casavir holds the baby very tenderly and is caught in the image that all those dark rituals could not but draw from the girl's life force. A shadow runs across his face. Catherine misinterprets it in her usual ardour to jump at defence when nobody was attacking.

"And don't you judge me, boy."

Casavir raises his eyes and tries to soften his face as best as he can.

"I don't. I am glad that you both are..." he probes for an adequate word. _Healthy. Survivors. Out of that place_. "Alive."

Catherine's anger dissipates in the air. She smiles an upset, crooked smile and scrutinizes the way his arm is bent to rest the baby's head in the groove of his elbow.

"I think you are much better at it already that I could ever aspire to be."

"What will you do when we return?"

Catherine shrugs.

"If the child lives, I will stay with her for several months, I owe her this. Then the chapterhouse will shelter her, and I will be back to my service."

That night, Casavir is lost in thought. His whole soul is filled to the brim with a fierce tenderness that floods him, melts his insides into a stream of selfless worry. He has discovered two things about himself. One: his omnipresent desire to protect is driving him like a whip when it is a child that needs protection. Two: he would like to have a child of his own very much.

* * *

For the next several days they travel on – slowly, painfully. The rains are chilling. The child is weak; every time she grabs Casavir's finger he can notice that there is less strength in that reflexive motion. He spends the days thinking if he can take several years off on the right of a veteran and keep her. Raise her. Love her like the bleak chapterhouse matrons never will. A child should not be left there so young. He understands Catherine: it is a difficult decision for him, and she would be judged worse. She has been earning her reputation for decades to ruin her mission by what she sees as mundane maternity.

It starts to drizzle in early afternoon again, and they both are mortally tired long before sunset. Casavir sets up a canvas to protect them from rain and wind, and a small fire warms the mood a little, if not much. He leaves to gather firewood to give Catherine some privacy; when he returns, he finds the child asleep on his cloak and Catherine struggling to improvise some soup of the dried meat and barley they have. Efforts of two cannot make it easier, so he picks the baby up and cradles her in his lap, humming some tune softly when she gives a stifled whimper.

Catherine pours a bowl for him and he turns his head sideways to sip at the empty soup carefully so that there is no risk to spill it. She gives him an amused look.

"You are wary as a father of ten, so much attention to little detail," she jokes light-heartedly. "Is there something I should know?"

"I used to have a little sister," Casavir says slowly, staring at the pink face of the baby. There should be more fat on this face. The girl looks like an ancient crone.

"Oh, that explains a lot," Catherine's smile is always in her voice; he does not need to look up to know it is there. "The way you are clinging to her people would think you intend to adopt her."

It hits too close to the truth. Casavir raises his eyes and Catherine blanches at his sheepish look.

"You cannot be serious." She shakes her head and corrects herself. "Yet you always are. You are indeed thinking about it."

Casavir nods and keeps silent. He has been caught thinking about taking a child from her mother; a mother who does not need her, but still. It is an ugly feeling. Catherine does not attempt to take her daughter from him like he would in her place. Instead, her voice sounds more concerned than angry.

"And did you think well about it? Do you realize this adoption will ruin both of our careers?" He stares at her in bewilderment, and Catherine groans. "Of course, you do not. Let me spell it out for you: I am your mentor, you are my apprentice, and one day we return after a long absence with a newborn child, and you take her in. Everybody is going to think you are the father; and this is not my weakness anymore, this becomes a public outrage to our faith."

Casavir is speechless for some time, and so many thoughts crowd in his mind that it becomes rather cramped in it.

"People cannot be that mean in their assumptions." He finally manages. "And it is not the truth. I cannot let this girl rot in the asylum for the fear of what they might be deluded about. They will be wrong, so it does not matter."

Catherine hits the ground with her fist and cracks the crust on her knuckles raw.

"I admire the clarity that must reign in your beautiful, structured mind, Casavir. It has been years, and yet you are the same sixteen-year-old boy who made everyone uncomfortable waving that letter in defence of Fenthick in front of their faces and thought he could save a betrayer by a paladin's oath."

"He. Was. Innocent." Casavir grits through his teeth; he tries to rein in his anger, but it boils and bubbles fresh as yesterday.

"He was dead. He was dead when he rushed after that Helmite into the portal. He was dead in his prison and dead at the trial. No one could save him and if his brothers and sisters vouched for him, it would damage the faith, for it would look like we demanded justice for everyone and covered up for one of our own. You, you did not care what it would look like; that mule's brain of yours sees injustice and fails to calculate the cost of your interference. I think I cracked you after all these years: you just do not recognize any authority from us mortals. Power is nothing to you; hierarchy and subordination are empty sounds to your ears; I doubt now that you even recognize the authority of the gods over you. Your healing seems all right, so it looks like Tyr puts up with your arrogance for now. Well, good for you, but I am different. I care what 'they' say."

Catherine exhausts herself and breaks off. Casavir looks at her and for the first time sees no experienced mentor, no paladin with enough strength to force a bull down, but a mortally tired person, a pale woman who has recently given birth, a proud warrior who had lost and was kept in captivity for several months without any hope to escape. He swallows her biting words and reaches for her hand.

"You might be right," he says gently. "And I will do nothing without your permission if it is going to hurt you. She deserves a good life, and you deserve it too. We will think more about it on the way."

Catherine looks at him as if he has grown wings, but nods.

* * *

The child saves them both from these hard choices. She dies quietly two days before they reach Thundertree.


	7. The Crags

On their arrival to Neverwinter, Catherine does her best to complete her formal duties to him. They share the final vigil in the Hall of Justice and in the morning Judge Olaf releases their bond and anoints the young man as a mentor in his own right should he wish to take a novice under his wing. Casavir listens to the monotonous enumeration of his duties seriously and wonders if he would ever dare to take on that much responsibility. As a ceremonial gift, Catherine slips a thin signet ring on his thumb. It is pleasantly cooling and gleams coldly even in the warm sunlight. She explains that its enchanted silver will give him some protection against foul intrusions into his mind. The signet is a crescent that can be a moon, or a letter – “C” for “Casavir”, or “C” for “Catherine” just as well. It can be considered a ceremonial gift, but Casavir _feels_ it is also a parting souvenir and an apology as well. He does not know how he can explain to her that he bears no regrets about her half-hearted mentorship.

Not a month passes before Catherine Harkenhart volunteers for a missionary expedition to Dambrath, a place so far in the south that it could as well be a legend. There is a loaded silence hanging between them when he sees her off to the docks, and neither of them knows how to handle it, so they exchange blessings and part their ways forever as if they would be meeting soon.

* * *

Casavir is relieved to learn that there are no students of an appropriate age who wish to choose the path of a holy warrior, and nobody expects him to pick up her teaching duties. He does not have the knowledge it takes to be a compass for a young soul. Swordfight is what he is good at, therefore he invests all the money he has saved up during his temple quest into a better set of armour. Master Crasnor takes his measurements and Casavir is surprised to learn how tall and broad he has grown over the years. Most of the generic plate armour pieces at the smithy are too tight on him, but then a lot of Tyr’s servants are elves, so it is no wonder.

He spends several weeks assisting Master Crasnor at the anvil and reading into designs and qualities of various items. He calculates the balance between speed and strength, walks through his familiar stances and blows and identifies his own weaknesses. He asks the templars to spar with him with training swords painted red and assesses the map of his vulnerable points.

Finley, one of the few novices of his generation that survived the plague, is now the library keeper. Far too many brothers and sisters passed away in the plague, and youth has taken places left empty by experience. The young monk seems enchanted by Casavir’s approach and brings him parchments with drawings of famous armour suits from history. Most of them are outdated and too heavy – Casavir needs to be faster, to step lighter, to have the freedom of movement, but he appreciates the little mercy of sincere friendship in his lonely life.

He sucks on this new idea like a wounded man sucks on a leather strap when his wound is cleaned from splinters. He is lonely and has always been lonely. Most of his thoughts rise and die in the quiet of his mind, and he cannot say a single person knows him. Casavir catalogues the small signs of this loneliness as he throws coal into the hungry belly of the furnace: he never belongs in a company; he does not share stories at a tavern for all the stories he witnessed are awful and he has no talent for turning them inside out and leaving a pleasant empty shell to be served at dinner; he has no one to tell his dreams to. He lets himself wallow in self-pity as he hammers large bars of metal into thinner plates – a task impossible to ruin even if he is an incompetent ogre of a blacksmith as Master Crasnor puts it. Strips of noble metals hiss in cold water, Casavir wipes sweat rolling down his neck and comes to the conclusion that he is better off this way. Every time he had a touch of personal affection towards a person, that person died or left or disappeared.

Perhaps he brings bad luck, or the gods expect his unprejudiced loyalty to extend to the humankind in general, without choosing favourites or binding his hands with settled feelings. _Is it what you want of me_ , Casavir inquires them silently, _is affection a crime against justice as well?_ He sends this thought into the logical grinder of counterarguments and can find no fault with it. He thinks that a beautiful lady deserves protection from evil hands no more than an ugly crone, that an obnoxious merchant’s life is worth just as much as a life of a selfless saint when both are attacked by bandits on the road, that no race or nation or gender or biography diminishes a person’s right to compassion, fair treatment, kindness, healing or protection by law. His mind wanders into the pet waters of his nightmares: killing orcs might be just as bad as killing people if it is not for the sake of defense, not in a combat, not reluctant. Any creature with a ghost of awareness deserves a life, a life without cruelty and torture. His heart grows large and warm with this discovery. He carries heavy ingots of noble metals from the stack in the back of the smithy and does not even feel their weight.

When his armor is finally ready, the proud Master Crasnor shines as bright as a bar of gold himself. Casavir raises his arms, bends his limbs, leans forward and is happy to see he can move easily enough. The suit has leather parts as a basis, and metal parts over vital organs, and mail parts at the vulnerable joints. It is lighter than it looks. No sigil decorates the suit except Tyr’s holy symbol amalgamated in silver in the middle of the breastplate. Casavir straightens his back involuntarily when he catches a glimpse of himself in the old mirror on the back wall. In the mirror, there is that person who every young novice ever aspired to be. That kind of person who has no doubts and misgivings, but walks through his life in steady, measured, confident steps. That kind of person who carries an aura of safety and reliability into every perilous place he enters.

* * *

Soon, the temple receives a request from the Graycloaks to assist a fort at the northeastern border in yet another confrontation with walking corpses, and Casavir volunteers to travel to the Crags with a small group of the city guards.

They trot along frozen winter roads and take a long detour around the Neverwinter wood, for neither Casavir nor his companions have fond memories of the place. They have not been ascribed any formal hierarchy, so they are supposed to be equals, and yet his obvious paladinhood separates him from the others more effectively than any banner or rank or post could. There is an unspoken agreement hanging in the air that makes innkeepers look at him for their final decision.

They move north; Casavir wraps his cloak tighter around his shoulders and lets his memory wander. He honestly misses the days when his correct vowels and polite manners were a reason for a fight, not subjugation. Nevertheless, if this is the role the gods want him to fill, he will fill it. He suggests the schedule of watches and voices everybody’s wish to halt for the night, he asks for volunteers to perform camp duties and gives small daily advice unobtrusively. By the time they arrive at the fort, Casavir has forged the respect he needs to rely on these soldiers.

* * *

He did not expect that the commander of the fort would be General Callum himself, and the noble dwarf has obviously weathered a lot since they last met. The fort in the frozen mountainous region is doing rather badly; its attackers – orcs, trolls, bandits and what not – are plentiful while its supplies are scarce. Two dozen villages are scattered in the valleys, and they are easy prey to those who conquer rather than plough. Nobody wants to serve that far from the capital. The mountain range is locked between enemies. Disregarding Luskan, it is the only trade route to Mirabar, a city of deep mountain dwarves who supply marble and stone. Callum intends to protect the route and enforce peace in this harsh land, and Casavir needs one look to realize the general has inadequate means for such an ambitious task.

There is a more burning problem though. People disappear from the villages, and the farmers whisper of the dead coming back to visit. There is nothing an army can do, but a priest would be handy, and Callum does not conceal his disappointment at the lack of such in their small team. He seems to be glad to see Casavir though.

“I think I saw your name on the death lists,” the dwarf muses aloud. _It is strange you are alive_ , Casavir hears. “That vanguard perished like butter under a hot knife.”

The words make his throat clench, so he says nothing. Callum shakes off his reverie and offers to tell him about the missing people at dinner. He recounts the tales and lets Casavir copy a network of mountain trails as he points out the villages on the faded map, the tiny specks of life in the middle of nowhere. From time to time, Casavir intercepts a strange look he cannot quite place. The general finishes his account and regards the parchment that grew crowded with Casavir’s hasty marks.

“This is… surprisingly accurate. I can’t recall any mention that you were also skilled in map-making.”

“I learnt after the war,” Casavir rolls his shoulder tiredly and packs the quill. “At the chapterhouse.”

Callum gives him a disapproving look that Casavir fails to accept as just.

“So you abandoned the army.” His voice grows flat as he continues. “We were in a bad need of officers and you did not stay.”

“I did not know I had a choice.” Casavir replies calmly, and Callum’s anger evaporates. “I woke up in the temple hospital ward, reported to the office at Castle Never as soon as I could walk, and was dismissed.”

The lines in Callum’s face tighten and he rubs the bridge of his nose exhaustedly.

“It looks like I am a worse general than I had thought, lieutenant.”

* * *

Winter is a harsh time to explore sparse settlements in the middle of nowhere. Casavir hikes up and down snowbound mountain trails and reads the footprints like a story.

In the villages, there is always a house where people gather to drink cold winter days away, and now they have all the reason to huddle together at night, too: in every village, there is a person or two missing. A child who stayed up late; a lad who went out in the dead of the night to check on the newborn lambs; an elderly wife who was to return from her sister’s place at the other end of the village.

Casavir talks to everyone who wants to talk to him. He seems to be the only entertainment these people are going to have for months. Women send him longing looks that he chooses to ignore, men measure him up, children run after him when he arrives and leaves. He takes a seat at the common hall, and half the village shows up within an hour to take a look. While many villagers contribute valuable pieces to his investigation, others recount all the gossip since the Netherese empire, complain of their neighbours’ vile deeds which importance faded a decade ago, suggest he buys their honey and rope and goat cheese, start philosophical disputes and what not. A jolly red-bearded farmer advertises his daughter’s hand in marriage and keeps to this topic firmly even after Casavir’s tenth attempt to redirect the conversation.

Back at the fort, he makes a list of disappearances, and then turns it into a map. He can see now that whatever killed or kidnapped these people travelled around the area, and there is a pattern. A careful predator hunts like this – prey from all the territory, so that the flock does not diminish. This wood is equally far from most of the villages, and it must be the lair. Casavir reports the possibility to Callum; five small teams set off to search through the wooded patch.

They do find the lair, the two vampires that settled in the mountains, and the remains of their victims. Some of them rose because a foul death like this, without a proper burial, prayers and mourners, will keep the deceased on the brink of this world. Casavir cleaves through the half-decayed flesh and suspects that the only advantage that sets holy warriors apart from common soldiers is that he has been taught to expect all sorts of foul liquids splash all over him in such fights. And perhaps their historic creed about dignified silence in combat actually takes its root from more primitive considerations, he muses while a young ranger in his team vomits behind his back. Shards of bone showered on them and the witty man got a taste of putrid marrow.

* * *

Later that day, Casavir sips at the lukewarm soup at the fort’s canteen and thinks about the two vampires, a man and a woman, obviously a couple. He wonders if the undead are capable of love or it was a companionship of habit rather than an emotional need. He also thinks about that farmer’s daughter and what future is in store for her. He contemplates the idea of love and cannot understand if he himself is capable of love.

He longs for some relationship, that he can be sure of. Yet every time a living breathing woman expresses her interest in him, Casavir finds that he is holding back. He wants to keep from giving anyone a false hope, a meatless bone of his affection. He knows he has some passion to hide and a general tenderness that makes children and animals cling to him. He does notice women. He does have reactions and reflexes and that ugly hunger that sometimes raises its head when his eyes linger on a pretty face for too long.

What he lacks is the easy nonchalance with which other people treat the matter: as if it is another basic need and two can have a meal and thank each other in the morning. Casavir is not attracted by those glorious women who shrug and kiss a person out of curiosity. He is attracted by women like himself: the shy, the quiet, the contemplative, the modest. To them, matters of flesh are intertwined with matters of soul, and any warmth is charged with emotion. He knows that other men consider these deep feelings unmanly and treat women like food or drink. To Casavir, a person is a person, and the women he likes deserve better than his passing affection. They deserve loyalty and love and a future. He is not a master of his own future to promise it to someone else, so he resolves – again, and with a little more bitterness than usual – that there are aspects of humanity that he is simply not destined to discover.

* * *

His task is completed, and he is to depart in two weeks, when the worst of the winter storms rage away. During these two weeks the fort is attacked by orc raiders. One of their scouts reports a larger group descending into the valley in the direction of one of the nameless villages, and Casavir gives a small nod at Callum’s expectant look. Of course, he will not stay behind. In these moments he feels a string of destiny pull him forward, and he has learnt to follow it without reservation. His sword will keep a weaker person from the frontline, and the less people are in the frontline, the better.

They travel fast, arrive in time, stand in the way of the hostile tribe, engage in the fight, fend off an attack, pursue the enemies, push them back and seal the fate of the orc raid by crushing the orc warriors and letting the wounded retreat back home. The winds in the high valley howl with fury when Casavir lays his healing hands on one of the wounded, a weathered ranger who is bleeding faster than his belly is growing whole. The man weeps and gasps while Casavir whispers his prayer and repeats ‘ _you will live, you will live_ ’ over and over again until the man trusts him. It is exhausting to be summoning divine magic after a battle, and Casavir shakes with fatigue and bitter cold himself.

Another man bleeds to death a few feet away, and Casavir bites his chapped lip grimly, so that the crust breaks and the metallic taste keeps him focused. He should have chosen the clerical path to be graced with more powers. He has no way to know if his sword saves more people than his non-existent priesthood could.

They return to the fort in the dead of the night, but nobody wanted to set camp when four more hours of walking with torches could earn them warm beds. In the courtyard, Callum is waiting. Casavir looks around for the officer who is to report to the commander and remembers that the man is dead. He can feel a decision grow in his mind like an underwater bubble that is about to rise to the surface, so he pauses, lets his gaze search the commander’s eyes and takes the first step forward before he knows it. Callum strokes his beard tiredly and gestures him into the headquarters. After a short report, the dwarf inclines his head in thought.

“You see we do not have enough men to keep the place safe. The orcs will return, and the orcs are not the worst thing that happens here. We are twelve people down and no reinforcement will be sent before summer. Perhaps of all who need your help, our need is the greatest.”

Honestly, Casavir has thought about it, too. Neverwinter feels so far away that it is almost a ghost. Its importance faded with the distance. The fort needs to send patrols, the villages need regular visits, the roads are not safe. The farmers are a brave folk to settle here, but they cannot fend off all those interested in their crops. The people who need his help have faces now, after he has talked to so many of them during his investigation. How can he leave and abandon them to their fate? The string of destiny is dormant, for he is too tired to heed such delicate signs, but Casavir knows he makes a correct choice when he agrees to stay as a soldier or a sergeant.

Callum smirks, and Casavir has a fleeting impression that the commander has planned it much more carefully than he shows. His younger self would be annoyed; his current self merely registers it as a fact. Callum continues:

“I appreciate your modesty, but we both know you were born to lead. I have a better idea in mind. This appointment to the world’s dullest place cost me a squire. He chose to stay in the capital, and I do not blame him, these mountains... I am planning to take you as my squire.” Something must be changing in Casavir’s face to reflect the slimy cold that creeps down his gut, because the commander adds hastily, misinterpreting as usual. “This is not just saddling my horse and cleaning my armour. It is an opportunity to learn, and I assure you, no military academy teaches you to build fortifications, manage local conflicts and hold your ground with a hundred men in the area that could easily need a thousand.”

Casavir is simply too tired to disagree.

* * *

He stays until the spring, and then for a year, and another year after that.

He learns to stay back and shout commands and establish a system of signals that works when the fray is too large for his voice to carry to the frontline. He learns to plan and win, to plan and lose, to plan and sacrifice, to make compromises and insist on his vision, to calculate supplies and secure their delivery, to enforce his discipline and his authority, to distribute punishment and rewards, to keep an eye on the troublemakers and to draw groups that put up well. He learns that a kind word may become a catalyst for a big trouble and that mercy may turn into a knife in your back. He learns that jokes may be backhanded threats and gambling is actually the safest way to keep a hundred people occupied with as little harm as possible.

He also learns that people have assigned values. A good archer costs more than a good warrior, but a good ranger surpasses them both, and a good camp cook can save more lives than all the three combined.

He learns that fleas and lice are not seen by many as a reason to stay clean, and that it is not obvious to most people that one should never drink water before it was boiled. He learns that there is nothing obvious at all: if there was the smallest fault in your instruction, it will be misinterpreted along this very tiny crack in logic.

He rides out and fights for so many times he loses count. He discovers that the hardest duty for him is to delegate: to place a small measurable piece of responsibility on someone’s shoulders and trust them to cope without his own help when all the parties know that his interference would be a sure sign of success. He leads as many raids as Callum lets him, for there are no healers in this forgotten land, and his one chance at divine magic a day is all they have. He buries the dead too many times to his liking.

They also hunt bandits and destroy their camps and escort merchants’ caravans. Once he is captured and tortured and rescued before it is too late and there is any lasting damage. In the camp medic’s opinion, he is back on his feet too soon, but idleness has always eaten him raw more effectively than pain. He files away the lesson that fire and metal can make a man part at the seams and become a helpless animal in agony. He did not deserve it, but maybe he needed this lesson to know that no soldier under his command will ever resort to torture, no matter what the gain.

These years of service are what he will later regard as his happiest years. While he lived them, he had no idea he was happy. It was tough and rough, worries and problems and wild guesses, and more work than hands to do it. When he looks back, he will see a spell of consistent good luck when his gut decisions were miraculously right and his daily objectives aligned with monthly and yearly goals well. This simplicity of a well-performed duty, this daily focus on the well-chosen route, this consistent clarity of the right and wrong – all these feelings will become a reference point when he grows conflicted and miserable later.

He forges some friendships, too – the men he respects, like Black Ballard and Joe the Catstep. They are easy to have a pint with, especially because paladins need a barrel to lose their sobriety, and nice to play a card game with on a long winter evening, especially because Casavir is not afraid to lose and that makes competition friendly. Ballard is called ‘Black’ for a reason: his expectations of the future are always grave and pessimistic. Casavir admits it is nice when he himself is not the grimmest person at the table. Joe the Catstep is a sunshine soul, a gifted archer and a sweet tooth. He stores his kind laughter shallow in his throat, always ready to set it free. He is a joker, but he only makes fun of himself, and Casavir likes his non-threatening company. With these two, he always knows where they stand.

It is never the same with Callum. Lord Callum has moments of arrogance and moments of almost fatherly affection; when busy, he barks at soldiers and Casavir can feel his own spine go rigid when he swallows his disapproval. Lord Callum has temper, Lord Callum was born into privilege and often forgets that the folk around him have no knowledge of many words longer than four syllables. Lord Callum can be a very unpleasant man when he is tired. On the other hand, there is simply Callum, without noble titles, that emerges on the battlefield or when the night is tough. This Callum is a rocklike structure – a brave, loyal, talented commander who weighs his words carefully and makes them count. They are not friends, but there is respect between them, and Casavir cherishes it.

He turns twenty-four and then twenty-five; the years were so filled with possible tasks and clear responsibilities that he only has the time to be mildly surprised how fast months blink by. Lord Callum likes to joke that Casavir is a statue – large, heavy, cold, and beardless. Casavir cracks his mouth in a resemblance of a smile and cringes inwardly. He has not felt young in a decade. He always shaves his face clean, on a march, in a siege, before an attack, after an attack, at a forest camp or in a tavern, in summer heat or in bitter winter. If he does not, he sees his father in the mirror, and he wants to be nothing like him. This is one of the things Callum does not need to know. Casavir honestly believes that this is one of those things nobody will ever need or want to know. A warrior does not show his heart until an axe reveals it.

Another thing that nobody needs to know is that a flash of panic lightens in his eyes and is quickly concealed when a rider arrives at the fort one rainy autumn afternoon. The messenger announces that Lord Callum is summoned to Neverwinter as soon as possible, for Sir Arland of the Neverwinter Nine has fallen in battle and the guardians of the Crown have chosen the noble dwarf to occupy this honored duty. Casavir watches Callum accept the honor with the proper ceremony and a lead ball presses down on his gut. They had talked before that should Callum die, Casavir will pick up his post, with all the diplomacy it takes. Casavir knows that a commander of a fort will answer requests and follow orders and try to squeeze honor and duty into the mix. He has come to dread the compromises it costs to fly that high.

The years of unconflicted service are over the very next morning – with a simple phrase so many men would long to hear:

“Arise, Sir Casavir of Tyr.”


	8. The Road to Mirabar

The green hills cradle an ice-cold stream that rushes its way to the River Mirar. All rivers and rivulets this side of the Crags flock to the great waterline. It is beautiful, dangerous, and completely unnavigable: the river is full of treacherous rapids and waterfalls, deadly pits and underwater currents that smash vessels into splints. ‘The Mirar runs deeper than death’, dwarves say.

Casavir dismounts and the other riders follow his lead. He walks down the rocky bank to splash some water on his sunburnt face – the summer mountains are merciless on fair-skinned people. He pauses to gaze at the crystalline water in his palms. What a formidable force can be comprised of tiniest contributions. Hopefully, this also applies to their work here.

The high bank at the influx is a naturally protected place: accessible from the west, sharp cliffs on the other three sides. The small nameless river can be conquered by a bridge; the Mirar is less violent here and it may let boats cross to the other bank. A garrison of fifty will be able to fend off a siege for as long as they have provision, and Casavir is always very particular about provision. If he does not have enough grain and salted meat and potatoes for a year, he simply does not hire. This is an unpredictable land; snowstorms and rains cut off roads for months, whole villages show up at your doorstep for protection, bandits target supplies to drive Neverwinter forces away. Casavir’s hands ball into fists at the thought of how much the country loses at the hands of highwaymen who take instead of sowing. It is not even the crops or the cattle: it is the lives that Casavir mourns. The list of his successes as Commander is just as long as the list of his failures.

His mind travels back to the first weeks after Callum left the command over the fort in the Crags to him. It still amazes him how smooth the transition was. The soldiers did not blink an eye when the twenty-five-year-old paladin was put in charge. It was he who doubted his own authority and pretended to be sure and confident while second-guessing if his intonations were right.

It took Lord Callum three weeks to reach the capital and be anointed and five more weeks to nag Lord Nasher into the realization that the north-eastern border was of primary importance. In the letter that travelled longer than that Casavir was informed that he would have the gold to construct two more outposts and man them. Two had to grow into three when Casavir attempted to meet the requirement: safe passage for merchants and uninterrupted supply chain of marble and steel from Mirabar. The old fort was too high in the mountains and too far from the road to provide regular patrols.

This road offers magnificent sights. It follows the bends of the river on its right and creeps up and down mountain valleys that cascade from the snowy peaks on its left. It crosses small bogs overgrown with silky grasses that are inhabited by thousands of birds in the summer; it ventures into dense pine woods that creep up the river from the great and perilous Neverwinter Wood; it winds in wide loops up and down several small peaks that dent into the riverbed. Very often Casavir finds himself distracted by the views that change with every mile, each of them more beautiful than the previous one.

He also sees the glorious landscapes with a military eye: obstacles, defendable heights, vulnerable depressions, suspicious nooks, and convenient turns for an ambush. There are numerous opportunities to hide a lair or cover up a small force all over the trade route. Safety will be a costly achievement in this wild place. Casavir lets his imagination take him to the perfect world of the future where there are small settlements and inns along the way. He sees the inexistent pavement on the road, safe sites for caravans with sturdy log shelters, well-equipped wells, and high signal towers to let the garrisons know their help is needed. The young commander blinks and the signs of civilization disappear, but the feeling stays: the feeling that this unfamiliar land is now his, and the seventy leagues of the dusty road are now his responsibility.

* * *

Recruiting proves to be the biggest undertaking until Casavir figures out the trick: pick up the local youths on the way and train them well. Really well. Their job is too perilous for them to risk their lives at the banal cost of money; skill and self-esteem are worth so much more. He is surprised to discover that his personal attention is more valuable than gold, and it does not matter to scrawny peasant teenagers how much coin they are paid or whether they are paid at all if he promises to train them himself. They flock around him like little birds and he does not even notice how he changes everything he does into a lesson. Most of these ‘child troopers’, as Black Ballard names them disapprovingly, are not of much use now, but Casavir hopes that even if they do not stay as his soldiers in the future, his attitude and manner will rub off them and they will be able to protect their villages when Neverwinter cannot.

He soon learns that unprejudiced attitude can win him some skilled recruits from older folks – widows who have no spark to keep farming alone, half-orc bastards who live antagonized and disrespected among their luckier relatives. Though many of the soldiers who started with Callum are clearly puzzled by his choices, they have the wisdom not to question them, and nothing settles personal issues better than climbing out of danger as a team.

There are days when Casavir finds it difficult to talk to people – the very thought of opening his mouth seems strange and heavy sometimes. There are so many interesting things he wants to think about, and he is never alone and never has the time to think them through. He piles the ideas up in a corner of his mind and sifts through them before sleep, on the road, in the rare moments of privacy. This constant exposure is the most tiresome aspect of this mission, but it is also necessary for a paladin to inspire and lead by example, so Casavir does his best. He puts on his better, charismatic personality and engages in small conversations, pays attention to personal progresses, listens to the problems that his officers, soldiers and recruits want to share. He knows how a young swordsman can bloom inside with a little praise. If he is not very generous with words, he makes each of them count.

* * *

The promised money dries out into half the size as promises morph into signed papers. Nevertheless, the tasks breed and grow. The road to Mirabar must be guarded and guarded well. Casavir has a vague apprehension that this is either a task he is supposed to fail or a task nobody really expects to be completed. He pulls up the maps again and takes a mental ride along the seventy leagues they are to protect. He tries to categorize the expenses and assign priorities. No matter what he cuts off the list, he needs these three forts.

Casavir knows he is out of his depth when his ideas on construction must turn into drafts and he struggles to break the images in his mind into simple shapes. He attempts to calculate the volumes of necessary materials and admits that he has no notion how to approach the matter. He has only ever erected temporary defenses to keep the enemy from charging completely unhindered; walls and towers and ramparts are beyond his competence. He looks through his budget again and finds it more than ‘moderate’ and suspiciously close to ‘inadequate’. He vaguely remembers there was some architects’ guild in Neverwinter. Requesting that kind of help is obviously out of the question: his correspondence with the treasury leaves no doubt that no paid labour is supposed to be involved, and his soldiers are expected to be all the workforce he has at his disposal. Casavir takes a glance at the waning moon that has risen high already, rubs his temples, folds the papers neatly and goes to bed.

He falls through one dream into another. In some of them, he labours through impossible tasks alone – hauls shipbuilding lumber, pushes tons of rock uphill, digs a colossal pit for a castle’s foundation. He wears his hands to raw flesh and protruding bones; he can hear his backbone creak under the weight. In other dreams, he wanders between random strangers and tries to convince them to help: angry villagers with hayforks, mine dwarves with gaping holes in their skulls, bandits with red-hot pincers in their hands, the stern monk from his early days at the chapterhouse, passing merchants that give him disapproving looks, street beggars wailing for his alms.

Distant yells tear him from the nightmares. As he hurries to the courtyard trying to shake off their unpleasant afterhaze, he strings their meanings like beads on a thread. He can strain his back all he wants, but the construction is an impossible feat on his own. He will need to ask for help, but who might be interested in assisting Neverwinter forces? He pauses and corrects himself: who might be interested in a safe road to Mirabar?

* * *

The commotion proves to be peaceful. A dwarven caravan was attacked but kept their goods and profits. They carry two wounded mercenary guards though and ask for shelter for the night. Casavir dispatches his sergeant to arrange a late meal for the travellers and stays to assess the injuries of the wounded.

As usual, he must choose one of the two. The first dwarf is a healthy young man; an arrow punctured his lung, and Casavir leans over him and listens to the whistle in his chest as he breathes. No gurgling sounds, thank the gods. It seems to be a clean wound. The other is an old warrior, scars welt all over his skin, and blood soaks the linen cloth drawn tight over his stomach. Casavir pulls the bandage aside, registers its questionable origin and frowns over the cut – deep and low in the right side of the dwarf’s stomach. He contemplates his choice for a second. It is not really a choice. The young dwarf will live on, healing would merely save him two months’ recovery. The old dwarf is slipping away: healing may pull him back from tomorrow’s grave, or it can do nothing at all.

He rises to his feet and orders the first stretchers to be carried to the medical ward. The older dwarf has no time for such luxury. Casavir looks around helplessly, all his thought already in the prayer, and a sharp teenage girl – one of his ‘child troopers’ – pushes soap in his hands and pours some water from one of the kitchen-branded jugs. He forgets to send her a grateful look for having the wit to get them ready.

Divine magic has an incredibly special fabric. The words of the prayer have little power on their own. What knits wounds together and melts bones whole is the soul that summons the gods’ help. Casavir rests his fingers on the dwarf’s belly and is flooded by a sadness first: the warrior has weathered through a lot of battles; his life must have been full of cold hungry nights and pain. He whispers the prayer and his soul swells with compassion and love: this is a living being, this living being is in pain, nobody deserves pain and death. He stumbles on a thought that this dwarf probably has sent many souls over the boundary, but he pushes through this doubt. This living being is in pain, nobody deserves this pain. L _et him be whole again, mighty Tyr, let flesh be healed, let pain subside_. In the minutes it takes for the healing to set, Casavir loves this nameless mercenary with all his heart, one human being who stopped to appreciate the flame of life and conscience in another.

The same girl, Tena, is there to steady the commander when he stands up and loses his footing for a moment, drunk on this peaceful magic, blood drying on his glowing hands. The paladin turns to her and smiles – a full, open smile, so unfamiliar on his face; it makes him too young and too vulnerable. The girl is awed. The girl suddenly experiences a fierce need to protect him from harm, and this need grows and grows and bursts into a larger need to protect in general. She walks the commander to the bench by the horse trough, touches his sleeve stealthily as a promise to his god, and runs back. The dwarf’s companions lifted the unconscious warrior and carried him into the building, and the girl remembers it is better to clean the blood off the ground before it dries. She carries a heavy bucket from the well and all her soul sings with the resolution: one day, she will become a paladin.

Casavir’s head swims with the combined effects of the magic, the nightmares, the troubles; some sparkling laughter is rising in his throat on top of it all. An answer scrapes at his skull through the thick fog in it. An answer he lets form on his lips before he remembers what the question was. Mirabar. He stretches, rolls his heavy shoulders and gazes into the cold obsidian sky. The Seven Sisters glimmer over the downhill forest in the north. It is Mirabar that needs a safe road to Mirabar.

Two days later, Casavir and a small group of the Graycloaks set off to the north with the caravan. They travel slowly, and Casavir uses the opportunity to learn about the dwarves and this mining city, to discuss the road with the merchants, to test his considerations against their criticism. These are the very people whose safety he is determined to ensure. Their trip is uneventful, but Casavir’s outriders report that there were lookouts on the way. They do not face any trouble because the trouble decides to stay away from such a large group of armed travellers. Casavir toys with the idea of escorting all the caravans and dismisses it as too costly.

* * *

Mirabar is an impressive stronghold on the surface – with thick sloping walls and sturdy low buildings. Its most magnificent structures, however, are concealed in the underground, and Casavir admires the effort and skill that went into these masterpieces of engineering. Everything about the city screams unspectacular, reliable wealth. There are numerous people in the streets, but one can see that the true power lies with the shield dwarves. The charcoal cloaks of the Axe, the city’s militia, are everywhere. There is trade and crowds and so much life that Casavir is lost for a moment. It has been a long time since he could remain anonymous in a crowd of strangers.

One of the merchants of the caravan accompanies him to the headquarters of the Council of Sparkling Stones. On the way the burly dwarf with a sly glint in his eyes interrogates Casavir about his impressions, and Casavir does not make any effort to conceal his amazement. The merchant soaks up every word as if he has erected the city on his own.

The caravan owners obviously vouched for him, and by a miracle the paladin is granted an audience with the resident members of the council within a week. He spends the time putting his request and plans on paper, making copies for the ten elected members and the marchion, and learning what he can about the crafts that the city is proud of. There are veritable wonders at the markets, and he warily admits it would be… nice to own some of these things.

Casavir is not one to spend money on trifles. He knows his limits and his luxuries. A sturdier backpack, a better knife, a basin of warm water, a roof for the night are the things he can have and can wish. Other things are things from other people’s lives. Furniture, for example, is the possession he will not own – when he passes by the market stalls, he can appreciate the craft and the skill of the carpenters and upholsterers, but he never pauses to look at a bookcase or an armchair twice. They are alien to the life he chose. This ascetic modesty sometimes leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, but Casavir dismisses it easily. He has never had a home; he is not going to have one. His office at the main fort is merely a shelter and another person will take his place seamlessly should he fall in battle. Casavir imagines himself on the large map that changes through the time. He cherishes the dull pain that the realization of his own insignificance always brings him. It is sobering, human, and his.

The day of his audience arrives, and Casavir steels himself. If they refuse, they refuse. It is his responsibility to ask for help because it can save lives of travellers. He does not want to show off his service, he is not in need of fame or praise or rewards or money. His mission is honest and clear as a church bell. No shame can stain his honour.

He is walked along magnificent halls and he knows his boots are too old and shapeless to step on these lush carpets. He sees the members of the council and he knows one ring off their hands costs more than all his belongings, including armour and weapons. His cloak is worn from washing and still features old blood stains. He is a crow in their midst. They study him as if he is a ridiculous messenger from another plane.

Casavir has heard that Neverwinter does not have diplomatic relations with Mirabar because the ruling shield dwarves distrust all humans and prefer to pay Luskan to ship the marble from their quarries to the rich cities of the South directly. He has no illusion that his appeal is mad and comes out of the blue sky and the wild hope that the interests of his country and this mysterious clan align.

He speaks of the road and his ideas; he lists the things they have already done with the small forces at his disposal; he answers all the questions with blatant honesty. He acts on his own. No, Neverwinter does not request their help officially, for Casavir has no authority to represent Neverwinter. A question is asked if humans are better merchants than dwarves, and Casavir is puzzled at that. He considers the question aloud and concludes that the skill of a merchant is a talent married with experience as much as any other trade, so it is a matter of personal gifts and inclinations, and race has nothing to do with it – as usual, this is a misconception to cover up for the inequality that many struggle to accept as their own fault. The marchion seems to be amused by his answer. He is dismissed and promised an answer tomorrow.

Casavir walks out of the building and takes a deep breath. He hopes he did not just ruin centuries of diplomatic contacts.

* * *

The council decides against Mirabar’s involvement in fort construction without a formal request from Lord Nasher and the Lords’ Alliance of the Sword Coast. However, the council also decides to recommend free trading companies to provide aid and proper finance to his endeavour. Casavir must travel to Mirabar by the autumn session of the next council in a year and report what use the assistance was put to.

Casavir returns to the Fort at the Crags with a veritable host of dwarf masters and a caravan of supplies bought for the forts by three merchant companies. Most of the construction will be complete by winter storms, and the next spring will see the three star-shaped forts ready.

Casavir breaks his soldiers into nine squads and they start regular patrols the following summer. He chooses the Middle Star Fort as their main residence. His heart is gladdened every time he catches a glimpse of their safe walls, watchtowers, and high parapets on their return from another raid to a lair of bandits or a confrontation with orcs. The soldiers keep the roads clean of fallen trunks, cut down the trees that obscure the turns, pull down logs and roughly cut planks to improve safer routes around small bogs, haul wood and freshwater to the network of high campsites, measure the road into seventy equal segments and erect roadstones to mark the way.

They are short of recruits, and Neverwinter seriously underestimates the cost of food in this land, but the trade route grows safer by the month, and at the end of the first year Casavir’s report to the full Council of Sparkling Stones is looked upon benevolently. The villages enjoy the peace and plough more land; many of the bandit clans choose to move elsewhere. His ‘children troopers’ grow into fine young soldiers. The land is still tough, they still bear losses, there are still terrible days and awful tragedies unfolding in the Crags, but the improvement is _visible_.

By the end of his third year as a commander, Casavir is named ‘A Friend of Mirabar’. He is presented a dwarf-crafted warhammer – a perfectly balanced, deadly weapon he accepts from the hands of the marchion. Shield dwarves never sell weapons of this quality, they can only be obtained through black markets or murder, and Casavir struggles not to feel pride bloom in his chest at this unprecedented sign of respect.

He is twenty-eight, he has done something right in his life at last and he is finally comfortable in his own skin.


	9. The Neverwinter Court

_A matter of great importance_ , said the letter in Lord Callum’s neat handwriting, _appoint an interim commander at once and fly to Neverwinter if you can_.

This is a cruel season to travel, but the urgent message hooks Casavir and pulls him forward like a fish out of his familiar waters. Again, he dismounts and walks his horse over the worse parts of the slippery road. Ice surrounds the two of them – ice on the path, ice in the air. A particularly strong gust of wind hits the man and the horse on the way uphill and leaves them shaking. Casavir wonders what made Callum summon him after two years of complete silence. What made the lord seal the letter with the Neverwinter crest and have him rush into the worst of northern storms.

He makes a halt for the night on a wide rocky shelf. A canvas and a small campfire make the evening a little brighter, and after some thinking Casavir gives the horse both the better place and the extra blanket. He can endure the elements with a warm thought or a memory; the poor animal had no reason to leave the stables. He inches closer to the fire and closes his eyes tiredly.

The garrison was so grim when he was leaving. Casavir himself had half the mind to cancel the trip: even bandits stop their attacks during winter storms. It will be four weeks before he reaches Neverwinter, and a good week before the first inn on his way. The road back will take several weeks as well.

He comforts himself that the routine in his forts is well-established and Black Ballard will do fine in his absence.

* * *

Neverwinter greets him with its regular clamour of streets, smells of soot and gutter water, and greasy looks of well-armed pedestrians who undress him with their indifferent eyes and put a price on every item he owns. They are not overly impressed with his riches, or maybe it is his military posture that discourages them. Casavir straightens his back involuntarily. He has had time to forget that crowded streets can be more dangerous than lonely mountain trails.

A doubt runs across his mind when he passes the Temple: a night’s rest and several pots of hot water would be most welcome. He stops this longing dead in its tracks. _Fly to Neverwinter if you can._ Whatever it is it must be important. He rides right to Castle Never.

Lord Callum of the Neverwinter Nine is not in a hurry. Casavir’s arrival is reported and a heavily mustached guardsman in an impeccably polished cuirass dismisses him until tomorrow morning. If Casavir is very honest, it stings a little, but he gives a mental shrug and exits the castle grounds in anticipation of hot food and a warm bed.

By the time he is back in the Merchant’s District, it is almost impolite to knock on the Temple’s door, so he hires a room and a meal at a small inn. Casavir’s allowance has been rather generous to his modest standards, but he prefers to spend it on the things that matter more than comfort. He takes some time to write down the order he will place at the temple store tomorrow: potions, herbs, some sandalwood oil for burials. He had run out of it years ago. As an afterthought, he adds a royal wax candle to the list. Let the children see a proper ceremonial service once.

* * *

In the morning, he reports to the castle gates again. Two large guards with impressive halberds escort him to a magnificent entrance hall and tell him to wait in a tone that bears no hint of respect. Casavir schools his face into an impassive, unreadable mask. He is not a boy with a letter at the gates of Fenthick Moss’s prison. He should not feel like one. He has spilt so much of his own blood for this city and has spilt so much of others’ blood that he will never be able to repent it. In the wild north they see him as a representative of Neverwinter, of civilization, of more sophisticated mores and better life. He is Neverwinter just as much as these decorated men who line the corridors and these refined nobles who lounge on the velvet couches.

The doors open, Lord Callum beckons him to enter, and it must be the throne room, for Lord Nasher Alagondar is sitting on the throne high on the dais, and Casavir remembers to kneel and rise with his permission. He is introduced as ‘Sir Casavir of Tyr’, and the ruler of the city starts a conversation that may sound like small talk but contains so many questions it can just as well be an interrogation.

“So, you are the man who constructed three forts on his own?”

“And how exactly did you manage to enlist the help of Mirabar?”

“What would you need their help for?”

“And I guess that the correspondence with the treasury was rather annoying, wasn’t it?”

“Are we supposed to assume that the road is as safe now as it could get?”

“Has Mirabar rewarded you generously for your effort?”

“The hammer is an honour indeed. What reward do you expect for your… service then?”

“You do not mean to tell us that you want to return to that miserable place?”

“I see.”

Lord Nasher is thoughtful for a full minute, drumming his fingers against the carved armrest. Casavir ponders his answers. He did not sin against the truth in the least. Perhaps his monologue about the people who look up to Neverwinter for protection and fight on through their lives with extraordinarily little support bordered on ‘too passionate’, but it is the truth. Lord Nasher raises his piercingly intelligent grey eyes.

“You must be a rare man, Sir Casavir of Tyr. I free you of your service as Commander of my forts in the Crags, and I will have you serve Neverwinter in this castle, under Lord Callum’s responsibility. We appear in need of men such as you are.”

Casavir opens his mouth, sees Callum shake his head, and closes his mouth. There is something in the air that he fails to understand, so without further protest he follows the blue Neverwinter Nine cloak out into the corridor, up the stairs and then into a large office. Callum tugs his starched collar open and suddenly grins at Casavir.

“I knew you would do better if I did not warn you, boy.” He proceeds to pour some wine out of the silver jug on the side table and pushes an intricately molded cup into Casavir’s hands. Casavir takes a polite sip and raises his eyebrows in a silent question. Callum shrugs.

“Did you think the high lords and ladies just kindly appreciated your pious insolence going to Mirabar behind their backs and painting Neverwinter weak and unable to provide for their own army? Did you think Luskan accepted the loss of Mirabar’s tariffs gracefully and did not plot against the no-name who took to the fool’s job seriously? You are lucky you walked out of that hall with the lord’s benevolence and not in chains.”

Casavir suddenly feels sick. He knows he should not be. He has done nothing dishonourable. Suspicion creeps up that the fort in the Crags could be, from the very beginning, intended to be an imitation of activity, an illusion of protection for the angry citizens, but he looks at Callum’s face and knows the dwarf would not spend so much effort and time to teach him if it all were a smokescreen. It is more likely that twenty different interests intertwined into a decision Callum disapproved of, and he gambled on an honest person to neglect the politics behind it.

Casavir is not sure Lord Nasher Alagondar has a right to command him to stay in his service, but when he visits the Temple Judge Olaf explains to him that an honest service to the gods implies an honest service to those favoured by them to rule, and Casavir is obliged to stay. The Church will consider this sudden rise in the world as his mission now.

Casavir keeps silent for a long time, and then asks Judge Olaf if the Church can bless a missionary to build a small chapel in the Crags. Having received a hesitant nod, he files a request at the archives, finds Finley and implores him to volunteer for the job. Casavir entrusts the monk with all the money he has and a long letter to Black Ballard. He also tells him to find Tena, the clever girl who wants to become a paladin, and bring her to the chapterhouse should she wish to follow the path.

He is to serve the same people who sentenced Fenthick Moss to death to appease the crowd and had no mercy for Lady Aribeth de Tylmarande when she repented.

The streets of his native city have never seemed narrower to him.

* * *

Among these old men of power, he is again considered young and inexperienced. His opinions matter to no one but himself. His values are politely dismissed as dramatic ideals of youth. Casavir knows they have already taken shape and grown monolithic. He will not change much.

While formally equal in their voice and weight, the Neverwinter Nine have different responsibilities. Lord Callum’s seem to include leading an army during wars and guarding the peace in the meantime. It mostly implies guarding the safety of the castle and Lord Nasher himself, for nothing starts a war faster than a highest assassination. This is where Callum needs Casavir – a person who cannot be bought or threatened into treason, as he puts it. It also means that to the world Casavir becomes a companion and a protégé of the city ruler. And to Lord Nasher Alagondar, the line between the truth and the appearance is always blurry. Casavir has seen people like that. They invent their own calculated opinions and come to believe them in the process of articulation.

He lives in the castle now and accompanies the liege lord to meals and feasts, parties and balls, trials and public appearances. On the very first day Lord Nasher takes a distasteful look at his boots, and in the evening Casavir discovers that his modest possessions have been put away into a locked chest. The letter on his table informs him that he is expected ‘to look his worth’ and wear the clothes in the wardrobe. Casavir suppresses his initial burst of anger, looks out of the window longingly – his room is high and faces north – and resolves to treat this as a uniform. _There is vanity of the rich and vanity of the poor_ , he recites to himself, _the good path leads one past both_. He can remember the dusty ancient page that featured the phrase in between other specs of wisdom. It is surprising how many of old monks’ writings come to life and start to make sense as he grows older.

Callum reminds to everyone who listens – which is simply everyone, since his voice is extremely loud and the corridors carry it far – that Casavir is a veteran, a hero, one of those brave men who defeated Luskan. Lord Nasher awards him a medal that Casavir does not dare to refuse, for the ceremony is sudden, very public, and inappropriately well-attended. He hides it until his church sends him a letter that he must wear it: it shall remind the world that Tyr was with Neverwinter in the hour of trial. He obeys, and it burns his chest with its undeserved weight.

He would much prefer to be a silent statue at the back of the room – another nameless guard, deaf and blind. Instead, Lord Nasher engages him in conversations, pours compliments to his valour and loyalty, seats him in front of the Luscanite diplomatic emissary who grits his teeth and makes pleasant remarks dripping with poison. _He demanded for you to be hanged_ , Eltoora Sarptyl, the head of the Many-Starred Cloak guild, purrs in his ear at a dinner and gives a silver laugh, smiling at the emissary. The eldritch woman takes to feeding him bits and pieces of that strange mix of intel and gossip that passes for information here at court – and she always laces it with flirting, touching his neck, leaning on his shoulder. Casavir assumes it is a cover to educate him, but he does not like it one bit. The woman scares him. He has no doubt she can kill a dinner guest and complain that the carpet needs to be cleaned now.

Lord Nasher leaves the capital for two weeks’ hunt, and the entourage of half the Black Lake population follows him to the nearby forest. The unfortunate stag who had the audacity to cross their way is roasting over the fire; the courtiers drink and laugh and flatter one another on their courage in dealing with the poor animal. The pine scent is supposed to be cleansing, but the air smells of blood and murder.

Casavir does not sleep a blink for several days because if anyone wanted to kill the man he is to guard, the opportunities are plenty. _Do not let the watchdog build your house, for it will construct a prison_ , he remembers another book while he shadows Lord Nasher on his evening walk around the hunting camp. Indeed. If the military rules, everyone is either an enemy or an ally and everything uncontrolled becomes a threat. Casavir tests the limits of his perspective and arrives at a regretful conclusion that he already has a lot of this military rigidity. The life he leads has grown into his introspective soul and it contaminates his once open and curious mind. His approach is limited in the very way he had tried to escape.

Perhaps this is the reason Lord Nevalle takes an immense dislike to him. His blue cloak is ever present, and Casavir guesses – correctly, as it will turn out – that the youngish lord is head of some secret police. He tests Casavir’s patience with veiled implications, circles around him like a hungry hawk, and sometimes when they meet in the castle corridors Lord Nevalle stares at the paladin for that unnecessary second that makes people feel they are guilty of crimes unknown to them. Of all the courtiers Nevalle is the type Casavir would not appoint to the night watch, but Lord Nasher trusts the fair lord enough to stay alone with him, and Casavir lulls his own suspicions best as he can.

_They all want to hurt you_ , Eltoora Sarptyl breathes out in his ear at a commemorative dinner to honour the anniversary of that hollow victory. Casavir focuses on his plate. _I want to hurt you too_ , she continues languidly, _but this is different. You are taking their place. You are eating out of the palm that feeds them by their birthright_.

Casavir can see that a fake heroic copy of him is paraded for the public to see, and he feels trapped inside it.

* * *

_A thundercloud of a face_ , Ophala Cheldarstorn teases him in whisper at a public hearing when Lord Nasher announces that the eastern bridge will be renovated within ten years, _why are you so grim, dove? Lord Nasher likes you_. She is another member of the Nine, the most surprising one. A brothel owner and an art patron, a collector of rare magical items and a former adventurer, a wizard of no certain powers and a rumoured courtesan herself, a noble lady without a noble title. Casavir has to acknowledge her beauty – she wears it like a weapon and uses it as one, too. She is more human than most people here, and Casavir sometimes tries to imagine Lord Nasher and her on the road together – young, reckless, daring. All her fellow-adventurers are bald, wrinkled, and grey-bearded now; Ophala’s magic keeps her fresh, and only her patronizing tendencies give out her age. Despite himself, he is often affected by her charm. He reminds himself that this charm is generally directed at the world and he is hit by accident. Collateral damage, friendly fire, seduction by proxy.

Lord Nasher does like him, but it is the kind of affection a lapdog would enjoy. Sometimes the lord is in the mood to talk and request his guard’s opinion on the people they met during the day. Casavir soon runs out of polite ways to put that none of them have the intentions they claim to have. Lord Nasher listens to him with his head inclined and keeps his final judgement to himself. Only once he lets himself speculate aloud:

“We must be a strange folk to you, paladin. Holy warriors like you can notice every pretense, every falsity. A truly honorable person will be like a beacon to you, a silver light in a sea of darkness. I once thought I was suffocating in the presence of my superiors and their complicated compromises. Tell me if you sense a liar, Casavir of Tyr.”

“You are a holy warrior yourself, my lord,” Casavir replies quietly and wonders if that other paladin who was in Lord Nasher’s service years ago was ever asked the same. What did _she_ say?

  
Lord Nasher emits a mirthless laugh.

“Not much of a warrior now, and little of that holiness left. I am a humble believer. I know my sacrifices and my shortcomings – no ruler stays a saint. And you do not see any silver light around me, do you.”

Casavir shakes his head sadly, and they never return to this conversation.

* * *

These nobles are a strange folk indeed. Casavir has never seen men and women of the same breed and class behave like two different species. These snobs also have shades of snobbism he had never suspected to exist. Born nobility and anointed nobility; landed gentry and landless gentry; born and landed, but not of a good breed; born and landed, of a good breed – but impoverished; Black Lake nobility or countryside ‘peasants’; owners of ancestral Blacklake mansions or fake impostors who bought a property in it; finally, there is also a division into ‘the better lakeshore’ and ‘the smelly lakeshore’. There are two hundred shades of pride, and not one of it is of merit.

_I can smell you are blushing inside_ , Eltoora Sarptyl murmurs in her intoxicating voice at another banquet of convoluted speeches and rowdy gossip. _Green and innocent like a spring leaf, you are_.

Casavir remembers the days when he thought that those simple men in the army were rude and immoral. These noble men and women could embarrass the worst criminal with the stories they share at dinner. Is Casavir supposed to laugh at jokes that taste sour to his palate? He is to tell the truth; he wears the symbol of Tyr on his chest for everyone to see. At the receptions his liege attends, he gets asked most ridiculous questions. They try to catch him unaware. Ladies giggle and cover their iron claws with soft gloves. Lords exchange amused looks at his serious answers. Lord Nasher enjoys the discomfort Casavir causes them, and Casavir has a strong suspicion that he enjoys Casavir’s discomfort as well.

_Paladinhood is not a party game for their entertainment_ , he complains to Judge Olaf in a confession when he tries to cleanse his soul of the mud they bathe it in. _Whoever holds the ruler’s ear will pour the message into it_ , the frugal response is. Casavir inhales the familiar scent of wax and dust, feels the blessing sink under his skin and accepts this as another trial.

In an attempt to hold his ground, Casavir often imagines himself standing up, pulling the fancy doors open and running, running, running down the stairs into the night, out of the gates, into the woods. He blinks, and the candlelit halls return. This set of silver dishes could buy a hundred swords for a year. There is a plate of winter strawberries in the centre of the table. He does not feel like he owns himself.

His repulsion grows physical. In his dreams he is chained, trapped, buried alive or bound and thrown underwater. His hands shake during sword practice. Bile rises in his throat at any smell, any misgiving. It is as if the world has lost the sun, and colours faded. Casavir puts on his armour in the morning and endures another day.

Lord Nasher fails to notice the deterioration, and Ophala Cheldarstorn tells him directly that his pet paladin is about to snap. Casavir listens to the conversation they lead as if he is not in the room with them.

“Send me away,” he says when they fall silent. “Give me a mountain pass to guard, an enemy to fight, a village to protect. Order me to patrol city streets at night. I am not myself in your service. I am a soldier.”

Muscles roll in Lord Nasher’s jaw, and his eyes take an unpleasant glint. Ophala rolls her eyes, and the shadow passes.

“No,” the lord says blandly. “You will stay here, in Neverwinter, and if you need a task, there are many cut out for you. Let me think. Leave, you two.”

* * *

Callum informs Casavir that Lord Nasher has signed a decree to establish a charity action to commemorate the fallen in the Luskan war, and Casavir is to supervise it. He is still to dine with the lord twice a week and report his judgement on those present. On other days he is free to abide as he pleases. Lord Nasher suggests that a monument is a good thing to start with. The treasury will assign a small sum to this purpose.

A monument is a strange choice when there are so many widows and orphans, so many veterans who ended up in gangs and prisons, so much reconstruction still not even started. Casavir puts on his old garrison cloak and sets off to wander the city streets. His measured steps and the night air help him think. Many families lost their dear ones, what will give them solace without becoming a bitter reminder? Many veterans work in the city guard, what will they say about spending money on another dead slab of stone? The city needs clean water, the city needs shelters, the city needs bread and literacy lessons and jobs. Casavir grows more and more excited, his heart beats its way out of his ribs, he knows his spark is back. Luskan. Water. Fallen soldiers. Dead stone. Life. Clean water. Jobs. He looks up at the stars and traces the outline of castle walls on the hill and tries to remember how high Black Lake is compared to the poor districts by the docks. He can write some of his dwarven architects and ask for advice.

In two days, he finds the perfect place: ruins under a rocky cliff, empty shells of poor huts, remnants of a road and a storage barrack. Nobody has settled here since the city fire. This idea will be expensive.

“I want to build a fountain,” he mentions at a dinner when asked if he has thought about the design. “In the ruins by the docks.” He smirks at the raised eyebrows and forks frozen in the air. “A fountain with clean drinking water, a legacy of the fallen bestowed upon the survivors.”

He thinks about the pride of landed nobility and of the way their women turn into vipers because this is their only chance at being taken seriously. He establishes a committee and spends a week visiting all the old mansions. He spends the money from the treasury on thirty silver brooches. They feature a tulip and the words ‘founding member’, and they buy him twelve members at first – daughters and wives from important families – and enough gossip to make other noble ladies harass their families into participation.

He raises more than enough money within a month. The last three brooches go for an auction kindly organized by Ophala Cheldarstorn, and Lord Nasher buys the last one himself. He does not wear it, though. The lords at the court feign indifference and joke about the weird fashion this autumn.

Casavir spends a week at the city guard headquarters talking to the soldiers and the officers. His luck is true: Jane, his old partner from the plague patrols, is a lieutenant at the docks now, and her officers agree to do a small extra duty: tell impoverished and unemployed veterans, their widows and children to find Casavir and talk to him. He has work they would like to do.

Two wagons from Mirabar arrive one sunny afternoon. They creak through the city streets into the docks, stop by the cliff he described in his letter and six dwarves put up tents and unload boxes of instruments. Casavir arrives at the scene just as they are about to be arrested by Nevalle’s men for camping in a public place, and after interference of Callum, the tents stay. The two lords, however, are both displeased with him for two different reasons.

The poor are paid by the day and more and more people show up each morning. They demolish the ruins, clean down the land and start construction under the dwarves’ supervision. The dwarfs do the complicated work: they throw the pipes underground and carve the rock of the cliff into the shapes Casavir drew for them. By the autumn everything is completed.

* * *

It is late afternoon – a strange time for a grand opening. The sun is already low in the west. Lord Nasher and his entourage are the last to arrive to the monument site.

The old knight stops his magnificent warhorse and takes in the sight. It is a new square at the crossing of three roads. It will be lined with apple trees. They are small dead sticks now, but a garden will grow here in several decades. The ensemble of the square is six new buildings to host small, but clean and well-lit flats, and the streets are marked into lots for more. In the middle of the square there is a fountain. No sculptures adorn it. It looks more like an enormous pile of roughly cut rocks. Water flows out of three pipes into granite pools.

It is nothing spectacular, nothing ambitious, nothing monumental, but people here and there cry. The crowd parts, and Lord Nasher can see Casavir. The paladin walks up to him – tall, strong, proud, his blue eyes so bright and clear – and the crowd watches him hungrily with the kind of admiration Lord Nasher used to inspire _himself_.

“Is this the monument?” He demands in a cold voice to mask the nostalgic emotion.

“Can you see it, my lord?” Casavir gestures at the cliff on the right. Lord Nasher takes a lasting look at his sincere face and turns in that direction.

The setting sun falls on the fountain and the cliff behind it. Every edge throws a sharp shadow against the rock. It is like the cliff itself is a painting in red and grey – hundreds of silhouettes are climbing the hill, they fall to their knees, they stumble and rise, they carry flags and spears and each one has a recognizable helmet. As the sun sinks in the sea, each shadow lengthens and dies.

It is a beautiful sight. It is a heart-breaking message. It is so powerful it is almost a treason.

* * *

The court is eating Casavir alive. A brief period when he was free to construct the monument was over too soon, and something changed. The paladin is ordered to resume his guarding duties, and every minute of his is filled with pregnant, heavy interactions. The only moments of respite are his morning sword practice and his late evening lessons with Ophala: Lord Nasher started to find fault with his chapterhouse-schooled manners and the Moonstone Mask owner volunteered to educate him. Her teaching methods are… unorthodox, for the lack of a better word, but she is intelligent and well-travelled, and Casavir desperately needs conversations without traps and hidden meanings.

It is Ophala who tells Casavir that the committee he founded met without him and voted on the future of the district he envisioned. No further construction will be done, and the committee will organize a ball in honour of the lords who led the war effort. Casavir grips the windowsill so hard that his knuckles go white. When she strokes his taut shoulder, he does not shake off her caress. The only good thing he has done at the court over these empty years is sinking into the abyss underneath his feet, and he is too overwhelmed with this sudden defeat to bear it alone like he is used to.

Everything goes awry slowly. Lord Nasher is impeccably polite in the presence of others, but distant in the way that borders on hostile. Casavir talks to every member of the small council and asks them to voice their support for the construction, but they smile and evade and redirect the conversation. Ophala is the only one who promises to talk to Lord Nasher on his behalf, but she brings sad news: the city has no money for such follies, he said. Orc tribes in the Sword Mountains have stopped all trade in the south; we cannot afford sending even a small garrison to Old Owl Well. The city budget is running low, and land is expensive. The lots of land around the square are city property and will be auctioned.

Casavir tries not to question her joy when he returns her comforting embrace gratefully. She tried.

Their relationship acquires a strange routine: she invades his space, he gives up inch after inch. He is thankful that her company drives loneliness away, but he is uncomfortable. He would much prefer to be friends – Casavir knows how to tread that ground, but Ophala is determined to speak with touches, and it is easier for him to drift with the flow than reject the only person he genuinely likes. Every time he is expected to kiss her, he withdraws. He cannot explain his own lack of enthusiasm. He had been dreaming of a love to purify his soul. Love is strangely missing all its power.

* * *

Sir Peris, a fifth son of a minor house, approaches Casavir in the castle’s training grounds one dull grey morning and informs him conspiratorially that Casavir has his full support. The paladin is surprised and answers that the city can afford to give some land to the poor at no cost, but the man laughs at that and says he understands this noble veteran charity is a lovely idea to mask the real plot. The one with sharp knives and one presumptuous ruler. Casavir stares as Sir Peris leaves and decides to tell Callum about this incident.

Callum sighs and tells Casavir to wait. He sends a page for Lord Nevalle, apologizes, and leaves the chamber.

Lord Nevalle does not blink an eye and tells Casavir that by reporting Sir Peris he has passed the test. A conspiracy has been brewing among the lords, so he has set up the rumour that Casavir was the one leading it. Should anyone approach him again, Lord Nevalle will be waiting for his report.

Casavir is aghast. It must be written on his face, for Nevalle nods contentedly and informs him that if he fails to name the people who approach him promptly, he will be considered a betrayer and a conspirator himself. He knew Casavir’s honour would be a problem, so the choice was taken from him. It is a necessary measure. Casavir can see Nevalle is neither evil nor a liar; yet there is that moment of utter hatred flaming up his soul, and he is disgusted by himself just as much as by this whole matter. Lord Peris disappears and Casavir knows this is his own fault.

_Obedience is not a sin_ , Judge Olaf tells him after this confession, _if your rightful ruler is in danger, it is your responsibility to find the source of danger and eliminate it_. Casavir closes his eyes and hopes Judge Olaf will believe the gesture to mark the assent Casavir does not feel. This is the moment when the core of his heart tells him: Judge Olaf is wrong. His Church is wrong. His Church has been wrong for many times. It is dishonourable to provoke would-be criminals into crimes to prove them guilty. It is dishonourable to design this lie.

Casavir thinks of unconflicted times when he had clarity. In this world of noble politicians, his every word is twisted into a lie. One day Lord Nasher summons him to the large council without warning, pulls him right into the tribune without any explanation and asks if he fought in the battle against Aribeth and her forces, yes or no. Casavir is obliged to respond in the affirmative. He attempts to clarify that he did not fight Lady Aribeth herself, he just happened to be on the same battlefield and their ways never crossed, but Lord Nasher proceeds to speak as if he hears nothing after the ‘yes’. Casavir is dismissed and escorted out of the hall.

Sometimes, when he passes along the streets, he can sense rumour bite at his back. He hears the words “hero” and “that bitch Aribeth” and he cannot sew them together. They make no sense.  
Ophala laughs it off when he asks her. She never answers his questions anyway. He feels guilty all the time he is with her, and he feels guilty every time he chooses to neglect the daily visits she demands. He is cold and a piece of rock and a senseless statue, and he does not deserve her. She cries, he embraces her; she kisses him, he responds with a heavy heart; her hands wander over the border of decency, he freezes, apologizes, finds an excuse, and flees. Something is wrong with him. He is lucky to have her. He does not deserve her. He cannot abandon her, it is nonsense.

Why does their relationship even exist?

* * *

Callum invites Casavir to his office a month later. The dwarf scratches his cheek and grimaces.

‘Ah hells, I am not good at beating around the bush. You are to pose for Master Pepin Pollo starting tomorrow.” Callum takes in Casavir’s obvious bewilderment and clarifies. “It is art. Painting. Lord Nasher needs your portrait for the gallery of military glory he is going to start in the palace.”

Casavir has an ominous feeling that flashes across his mind like a meteor in the night sky.

“What do I have to do with military glory? I will not pose. This is the kind of vanity the gods forbid.”

“Look here, boy. You are deep in the game you fail to understand. The large council voted to award you another title. You shall be called “A Hero of Neverwinter” and your portrait will be in that damn gallery whether you want it or not.”

Casavir digests this information.

“Lord Callum,” he says slowly as the truth dawns on him. “Is it done to erase the name of the Hero of Neverwinter, the real Hero of Neverwinter, from our history?”

Callum frowns, and this is all the answer he needs. Casavir is horrified that he did not see it earlier. The medal, the receptions, the lord’s benevolence, the rumours, his account at the large counsel – they all suddenly make sense.

“It is not possible. Hundreds have seen him. I have seen him.”

"Do you think that many people know the truth? That more than a dozen cares? That bastard betrayed us all. He did not follow his honour to the end, he claimed the trial was a fake and that justice was a fraud. He was exiled. His name is soiled. His example can inspire and lead no more.” Callum gets more and more agitated as he speaks. “You, you were on that battlefield. Is it so hard to assume it was you who brought her to justice? The Hero of Neverwinter is as good as dead. A decade will pass and the rumour travels farther, absorbs detail, is reiterated for so many times it becomes true. All great legends were made like this. Think about it. If someone worthy carries that mantle, it will inspire generations."

A bitter taste fills Casavir’s mouth. He wants to run. He is a caged animal, and the cage has grown so small that its bars press into his flesh.

He walks all the way to the Moonstone Mask. It is raining, and his wet hair sticks to his forehead. Ophala rolls her eyes and orders a room to be prepared. He is cold and wet and miserable, and sick with himself, and he feels so helpless, so unworthy, so incapable of anything good. He has no will to reject her when she shows up in his room. The feeling of the trap only intensifies with her caresses. He is defenseless and she has all the power in the world. Ophala does not have doubts, Ophala is invincible, Ophala knows what she is doing. Why not give her the passion she obviously wants, even if it feels wrong – everything feels wrong. Everything rots and rusts and sinks in filth. He used to imagine this kind of situation. If he were himself, he would want her body now.

The truth is that he does not.

Ophala groans dramatically and rises from the bed.

“I give up. This is the hardest bet I have ever made, and I lost it. Enough.”

Casavir sits up and watches the furious woman silently. She is telling the truth now, and this is what was wrong. He had felt her lie and he was choosing to ignore it. He watches another catastrophe unfold as if it does not concern him. A bet, oh.

“You, you are a block of ice. You just don’t have the drive at all, do you, sanctimonious freak? Eltoora laid her claim on you and I was stupid enough to rise to the bait. I bet she was laughing at me all the time! Seducing the vowed paladin who cannot be seduced. What a shame. I was afraid I would have to propose you to get you into my bed. Are you married to your ugly god? Are you incapable? You know: I do not care. Enough.”

Casavir regards her without words. He would cry if he could scrape up enough emotion. His service was a cover, his effort was a fraud, his relationship was a fluke. He does not have a single soul he can trust. It is so painful that it is almost easier this way. Ophala picks up her clothes and makes her way to the door. She turns back to him in the doorway.

“It felt good to be loved and famed, didn’t it?

Casavir lets these words cut deep because he deserves them. He sits in the rumpled bed for another ten minutes, listens to the rain outside, thinks of the map of Neverwinter he remembers from one of the beautiful books of his childhood. There is blood threaded through his thoughts.

* * *

In the early morning of the next day, he returns to the castle and packs his old bag. He weighs the Mirabar hammer in his hand and sighs. Leaving this marvellous weapon behind would be a shame even if he is more confident with a sword. Casavir wraps the hammer in his spare clothes and his bedroll. He will need it.

His official letter of resignation is left on the table in his room. He walks out of the castle grounds without looking back, buys a nameless horse at the Golden Apple inn and saddles it carefully, checking all the straps for the long way. He inhales air as if he can breathe out the pollution that is choking him. Casavir trots through the city streets and listens to hooves clink against the pavement. The sound is soothing. The wind is cleansing. The road always heals.

He thinks about looking back when he passes the gates, but a sudden fear grips his heart – a fear that he will be sucked back by the city – and he spurs his horse on.

* * *

A young sorceress from a faraway Merdelain village pauses to admire the city walls and the diverse folk hurrying in and out of the gates. She thinks of the famous Academy and of the hundreds of books waiting for her. This city may be her destiny. She lets her mind inspect the idea without a hurry, for she has learnt to recognize and appreciate these moments when her fate pulls at her to pay attention.

A stern man on a chestnut horse gallops past Ingrid, and Ingrid turns back to stare at his billowing cloak, too warm for the weather, too faded for a decoration. For some reason, she is caught in an intense sense of sorrow.


	10. The Sword Mountains

Casavir wakes up with a gasp and stares into the darkness, struggling to grasp where he is. It is an inn room, soothingly generic and forgettable. He takes a deep breath and wills his shoulders to relax. A ghost of his dream lingers in the room, but its fabric is losing its integrity fast. He recognizes the faint sadness that normally accompanies dreams from his childhood. Before the war, before the plague, before everything.

In the darkness, he is young again. At times, he is visited by the strange thought that all people must be carrying their fifteen-year-old selves in their hearts, and he is not the only one who needs to calculate his age when asked. When he talks to a soldier, or a merchant, or a random stranger in a village he passes, he spares a moment to look into the eyes of those people and search for the shadow of the children they used to be. It is difficult for him to blame people for their deeds. Every single one of them must have had a chain of misfortunes that shaped them.

Casavir rises to his feet and lights the candle in front of the mirror. His reflection stares at him dourly. The man in the mirror is starting to look the way Casavir has felt for a long time. Nothing changed much, but there are subtle changes: his unsmiling expression has worn sharp lines in his face, his profile seems solid, and despite the scarce light he knows there are several silver threads in his hair already. He is thirty-two and he did not notice how his life was gaining speed. A month was worth so much when he was sixteen, and so many events were packed in it easily. A month is nothing now, it is barely enough time to complete a thought or a trip. Three months passed since he fled Neverwinter, the Jewel of the North, and the weeks simply melted off his life.

One of the windowpanes has a crack and the wind is whistling in it. Casavir remembers the winter storm he braved to travel by Callum’s summons. From the wind taken, to the wind returned. He might be an excommunicated believer and a deserter in disgrace, but no power can take his mind, his strength, and his experience from him. He is strong and hardened, his expertise with weapons is formidable, he is a small army on his own. He does not have faith in a city or a nation, but he has faith in the people. Lords and ladies speak of national interests and bend the concept in their own favour, but behind this fake idea lie the simple needs: life, safety, prosperity, peace, respect, justice. The state fails to provide them; somebody must.

It was very egotistical of him to think he is unwanted and wallow in self-pity when every single corner of the world is in urgent need of strong hands and kind hearts. This is a terrible world full of death and suffering. Casavir is incredibly lucky in it: literate, well-trained, strong, healthy, free. It is time to stop yearning for things that were never intended for him. It is time to tame his loneliness and live with the beast. It is time to stop being selfish. It is time to fight for those who cannot protect themselves. He is ashamed to think of the days when he was tempted by the heights of the castle and the ground pulled him like a magnet. It is a paladin’s destiny to die fighting, and he wants to die well.

Casavir strains his shoulders and smirks at the muscle rippling under his skin – it is the same feeling when one tests a well-balanced sword. A body is a weapon and a vessel, nothing more. His thoughts were so dramatic simply because he was idle.

* * *

The Sword Mountains are a savage land between the deadly swamps of Merdelain and the Kryptgarden forest, and it is difficult to judge which of the three is the worst place to build a house. It is a surprise that people have settled in all of them. The southern border of Neverwinter is a veritable frontier: orc tribes that settled in the mountains centuries ago are growing too numerous for the barren land that cannot sustain enough game and fowl for so many hungry bellies. For years, Casavir has heard reports of the atrocities here: orc raids and orc feuds are a terrible mix.

Before the war, this place had manned outposts and well-patrolled routes to Waterdeep in the south and Triboar in the west, and it was a dangerous road even then. Now, with Neverwinter forces withdrawn from all borders and the presence of central power non-existent, every tiny village fends for themselves, and numerous strategic heights and camps are either abandoned or occupied by shallow water scum. The old map Casavir vaguely remembers featured the ancient trail that is now ruined by mudslides and rockfalls, and the paths beyond it were never even scouted. It is a perfect place to be lost to history.

He sells the horse in the last village that may need one. This is a cruel destination for travellers: during the summer months this side of the backbone is dry as a stepmother’s heart, and a week’s supply of water must be carried, for the water sources are scarce. Poison them – and no humans will survive. Orcs will. There must be underground rivers, and caves are deep here. Higher by the peaks, there are frozen caps and streaks of glaciers and Casavir’s observant eye notices the naked rims under them. That means that they change in size from season to season, so there must be mountain streams where they melt. It is not like he has travelled here in search of breathtaking views, but he identifies several peaks that do not look completely impossible. From their tops, he will be able to see more and he needs to complete a skeleton of a map by the time autumn paves the paths with danger.

* * *

He spends several months exploring the area. He gave up shaving after two weeks, because it is a waste of precious water. Food is easier: he hunts when he can, and his emergency supply of grain and dried meat runs low much slower than he planned. He sleeps in his armour with his sword in hand: despite his efforts, small bands of orcs sometimes are lucky or unlucky to stumble upon his well-hidden camp by accident. On several occasions, death brushes so close he can feel its cold breath at the back of his neck. It is astonishing that he still feels safer on this lonely crusade than he has felt for years.

He carries his notes in between his breastplate and the leather padding under it so that neither rain nor his own sweat can ruin them. He marks down sure paths and dangerous places where ridges hang over his head ominously. He catalogues every tiny water source he can find, even cracked soil and weak blades of bulbous grasses that can indicate there will be a spring here during the better months. He counts his steps and notes down the distances and the heights. What is more important, he tracks regular routes of orcs and tries to learn their patterns.

It looks like there are at least eight distinct tribes that cross their paths now and then, and half the times their confrontations end up in violence. They do not bury their dead, and Casavir studies the ugly faces, the ornaments on their pelted clothing, the warrior tattoos, and scars. He tries to determine if they are old or young, high or low in the hierarchy, what weapons they wielded in life. He has a vague impression that the orc society is way more complicated than he had thought. They obviously have beliefs, a clan system, castes, initiation ceremonies, some cattle farming and simple crafts like furniture-making or basic construction, even art and magic apprenticeship. Can their violent ways be ever altered? He can imagine what the generals will say to him if he shows up in Castle Never and suggests teaching orcs to live in comfort in order to make peace with them in the distant future.

He attempts to conquer a trickier peak that will show him the area from the bird’s eye view. The elven hunting books that Catherine had him read come to his mind. Breathing creatures with self-awareness were described there with all the indifference of the superior species. All that language showed it clearly – “breed” instead of “family”, “use” instead of “meaning”, “instinct” instead of “emotion”, “attachment” instead of “love”. Casavir does not want to be like those cold-hearted ancient elves. Orcs have culture, however primitive, violent, and hostile it is. Orcs have family ties; they are capable of loyalty and grief. Yes, they see kindness as a weakness and peace as a temporary humiliation of the weaker and yes, they kill people and enslave people as a manifestation of prowess. That makes them enemies, not vermin.

Casavir throws a bunch of rope down the rock shelf he has just climbed and tries not to look under his feet when he descends with two ends of it in his hands.

Enemies are different from vermin, because one must observe the rules of honour when fighting, whereas extermination is pitiless. Casavir shifts his weight carefully, trying to rely on the rope as little as possible, and recites the list he has worked out long ago. Do not kill the unarmed, regardless of age and gender. Spare children and old ones. Attack only those who would attack you. Leave a chance for them to lay down their weapons. Spare the wounded. Show mercy.

He plants both his feet on the firm ground and exhales noisily. Sweat is flowing down his neck, and he wipes it awkwardly. This peak will stay unconquered. It was probably a terrible idea from the very beginning.

Casavir pulls one end of the rope and coils it carefully. He takes a look at the sun, too low above the horizon. A hawk laughs in the pastel blue sky adorned with feathered clouds. Why can’t they all live in peace.

* * *

Once he makes camp in a desolate village on his way back to the inhabited areas. The bones of several houses are standing out like a skeleton of a sea creature thrown ashore, and he can recognize the remnants of a street, blackened planks of burnt down barns, a stone well that, unfortunately, has run dry decades ago. There are several stone foundations overgrown by tall dry grasses, and Casavir knows the village met a violent end when he recognizes a rusty arrow in what must have been a ribcage once. If he is wounded so irreparably that he will become a burden in a fight, he thinks grimly, he will become a gravedigger and travel the world burying those who were left to the elements. He will bury the nameless dead and plant oaks on their graves instead of gravestones, and years later he will look back and see a dense forest cover all of the Sword Coast.

He spends the three winter months in a village called Lindenbrook. These places do not see as much snow as he is used to, but they are subjected to high winds and nasty ice storms. The drop in temperature allows storage of meat in underground larders, so spare cattle is got rid of about this season, and this is also when groups of orcs attempt their raids. Casavir offers his assistance to the village mayor in exchange for a roof over his head. The villagers measure him up approvingly. No weak people live in these places, and they value strength above all things.

Casavir spends little time under the roof he bargained for. He fights and scouts, scouts and fights, and none of the attackers even enter the village that winter. He teaches the locals to fight with more efficiency, indicates the place where a watchtower could make their life safer and makes a map of routes for patrols by the season.

“Stay. You can marry the young Harriet or Lagertha, the widow. We will help you build a good house,” the mayor suggests while Casavir is packing his bags. “There is nothing on the roads but death.”

Casavir shakes his head and leaves at dawn. If a single person could keep them safe, they will be able to protect themselves without him. This is not the settlement that needs him most.

* * *

This year, he tracks small groups of orcs on their way to the villages he chose as his frontier and engages them before they can do much damage. Sword fights are always short; with that much advantage in skill, three or four orcs are no match for him.

He has to be careful not to run into larger gangs, but once he does, and still he is the only one left standing afterwards, surrounded by a dozen corpses and covered in thick blood from head to toe. He wipes his eyes clean, spits and meets the entranced gaze of a young orc in the distance. The… boy is afraid to take a breath of air, to say nothing of making use of the crude short sword in his hands, and Casavir gestures for him to run. The orc fails to understand him, and Casavir, high on the battle spirit, scowls at him and growls menacingly. This language proves to be much more comprehensive.

Casavir plops down on the cleaner patch of the ground ungracefully and takes several deep breaths. He coughs some blood from his lungs from the massive blow he suffered when the orcs circled him for a minute. The blood is just as red as that of his enemies.

This is the day he receives that weird nickname which is both a praise in these primal warrior cultures and an offense to his sense of orderly duty. The Katalmach. The one who loses himself in battle. Casavir will learn of it much later. By the time he understands that the scary orcish fairy tales feature himself he will have heard it for many times. At this point, his knowledge of their vocabulary is scarce and picked up from evident clues: “water”, “beware”, “kill him”, “hungry”, “stop here”, and several vague terms of wide coverage that he guesses to be obscenities.

He makes it a point to learn more. After some skirmishes, there are survivors, and some of them speak a few sentences of Common. Casavir interrogates them, memorizes new phrases, and leaves them tethered. It takes the captives some time to get free, and it is enough advantage for him to disappear without a trace. He wants to keep them on edge. He wants to prevent unorganized, spontaneous violence like ‘valour trips’ of young orcs to decorate their dwellings with a few souvenir heads, or lazy robberies of daring individuals who do not wait for a raid to be organized by their clan for the simple reason that their share of the plunder will not be worth the trouble.

He covers a lot of distance every single day. If he shows up with any predictable regularity, they are going to figure out the pattern, so he makes erratic attacks, bites at the heels of larger groups, disappears from the steep slopes where they are searching for him thanks to the sturdy ropes and some very peculiar knots. They are common knowledge in the much steeper Crags, but a novelty here. Sometimes he meets travellers who dare a trip to another village, and sometimes he escorts them if he knows there is trouble on their way.

As usual, news is a precious commodity in rural communities, and soon every single soul in the area knows of this mysterious knight who ‘keeps watch over the Sword Mountains’. People need so little spark to make a large fire, and he hears dozens of more ridiculous accounts. Obviously, he is either a ghost of an ancient warrior who cannot find peace because orc scum treads upon his grave or a magical guardian summoned by a mad wizard who looks for his long-lost love kidnapped by an orc clan. Indeed. Casavir starts to doubt if any of the recorded epic legends have a sentence of truth in them.

* * *

Something sinister flows in the wind that autumn. Casavir can hear dead men scraping underground when he passes by old ruins and neglected cemeteries, so he stops camping in the abandoned villages even if they offer shelter from the biting rains that arrive earlier than usual this year. Orc clans grow restless, too. Two of the smaller clans seem to be moving deeper into the eastern passes together, and Casavir follows them despite the deadly weather. If they cross the mountains, settlements loyal to Triboar may be in danger. However, the two clans do not dare into the snow-capped wilderness, and Casavir decides to return to his familiar trails.

It is later in the autumn than he planned to return, and the storms are too violent even for this perilous season. Heavy clouds drag their swollen bellies into the north. They promise downpours or snow, but mostly pass over like empty threats – loud with thunder and scary with lightning. Nevertheless, some of them must have spilt their guts, for the trail is erased by an untimely mudslide, and Casavir must find his way around it. His supplies are running low, and he is close to the regular routes of the worst clan of all – the name of ‘Logram the Eyegouger’ does not just sound obnoxious.

Another problem is that there is less and less daylight every day, and today he has hardly covered five leagues. To make things worse, he can see a snowstorm brewing in the sky. Grisly grey clouds surround the mountain ridge.

It is known that there are periods of good luck. Bad luck, however, accumulates drop by drop and waits for a single day to strike in all its black glory. This is one of such days when everything that does not depend on the choice goes wrong and the very fate frowns. First an unsteady stone Casavir tries warily gives in and rolls down, setting numerous stones off balance and leading to a veritable rockslide on this bare northern slope. Then excited voices hoot and whistle in the distance and Casavir realizes they are too many to face. When he runs uphill, arrows fill the air, and though most of them brush against his armour or miss completely, one lucky shot catches him in the vulnerable joint and Casavir can feel piercing pain in his shoulder. He keeps running and hopes he will be able to lose his pursuit in the wooded area in the eastern part of this ridge, but he makes a mistake and choses the wrong path that leads to an empty shelf that breaks off into a narrow canyon. He could not know this, and yet he feels extreme annoyance when he has to stop at its edge and bare his sword. To make maps for twenty months and perish because he took one wrong turn. The gods do have the sense of irony.

The only advantage of this shelf is that it is narrow, and he can meet the attackers one by one. The downside is that should he lose his balance, he is as good as dead. The arrow in his shoulder throbs like hells. Casavir turns to the pursuit and raises his chin stubbornly. If this is his death day, fine. He has been waiting for it.

One of the orcs falls into the canyon spooked by his companions screaming ‘The Katalmach!’ at the top of their lungs, and it leaves three of them. Two fall quickly, but the third one is smarter: she retreats and keeps yelling without a pause. Casavir knows it means that the large gang he heard is close. Desperate, he looks around and measures the width of the canyon. No human can jump over these twenty or so feet. There is a rock on the other side that he can throw a loop of the rope on, but he cannot judge if it is stable enough to bear his weight. Even with the rope in the right place and the rock steady and sure – his shoulder is injured and pulling himself up from the canyon might be too much. Casavir would never do it in his sane mind.

The screams are joined by a war cry of a good dozen throats, and Casavir is strangely detached as he watches himself fold a loop, throw it, miss the rock, make another one and throw it again. The rope catches and he pulls it tighter. There is no time to get scared, there is only a protesting kick of his instinct in his gut, a dizzying sensation of a fall, and a searing pain as he grabs on the rope with his injured arm and pulls himself up, up, up, to safety.

Casavir is very thankful that he was wearing his shield on his back when another arrow bites into the wood and scrapes his back through it. His ankle aches madly now, too, and it can barely support his weight. He limps up the unknown path until he is completely out of breath, and he can register no sign or sound of pursuit.

Casavir sends a short prayer of gratitude to Tyr. He is lost and wounded, it is getting dark and the sky looks like it is ready to burst, but he gets to live another day by a sheer miracle of the gods. Now it is the choice whether to heal his shoulder wound or his torn ankle. He would prefer the ankle: being able to walk is a primary need now. He clenches his teeth and pulls the arrow out; blood fountains from the wound, and now this one is a priority, so the ankle will have to keep hurting. Let flesh be healed, mighty Tyr, let pain subside.

A gust of wind throws sharp snowflakes into his face, and Casavir attempts to stand up. He hisses with pain and decides to crawl on all fours. He cannot stay in this open space. He needs some cover and a fire. This storm is going to be awful. From his experience, it may last for several days.


	11. The Nameless Peak

When a human body is freezing, cold creeps from toes and fingers to feet and hands, and then to legs and arms. The initial sensations are remarkably similar to a burn, but soon a numbness envelopes the limbs and creeps up, into the core. This numbness gives way to a pleasant illusion of warmth and comfort; the inner stream of consciousness slows down and grows fantastical, the heartbeat quiets – and then death comes.

With blood loss, this path into darkness must be swift. Casavir registers the stages listlessly: his body feels alien, his mind is clouded, he sees visions of things that should not be there – ripples of soft light in the air, sunset sparks reflected off his gloves when he crawls to the darker shape ahead, a wall of limestone slabs that is distorted at his touch, a wooden door he knocks at without making a contact with the surface – and then he is tired and does not care of anything. He is warm and snug and if there is a weight on his chest, it must be the soil. Remarkable. He would never guess that the dead can feel the weight of their grave. Can they hear fire crackling? Can they smell it?

Casavir opens his eyes and stares at the low wooden ceiling and the fluffy grey cat with pea-coloured eyes that is occupying his chest as if it has always been there. He raises his hand tentatively to stroke it between its pricked ears, and he can swear the cat rolls its eyes but tolerates his gesture of good will.

“How do you feel?” a youthful male voice asks impatiently, as if Casavir has already failed to answer, and the cat turns to the approaching voice and gives a loud purr of anticipation. Casavir turns his head and loses the gift of speech for good.

He had not expected to meet the green-eyed mage ever again.

The Hero of Neverwinter is plucking feathers off a chicken. There is fire roaring in the hearth in the middle of a large round room, and water is simmering in the pot above it. The place is small and very cramped: all the rooms of a regular house seem to be packed into one circular space. There is a kitchen area marked by a cupboard with jars and bottles; it shares a planked table with a library nook outlined by several dimly lit shelves and a pack of hay; a half-drawn curtain masks a washbasin and a privy; further to the left there is some sort of open storage space littered with… everything from a longbow and a broken cart to clothes and braids of garlic. There are two goats and a tiny kid, and several hens in cages by the door. By habit, Casavir registers that there are no windows. His gaze takes in the heap of his own armour pieces and the bed of furs which he currently occupies and returns to the owner of the house.

The mage exchanges an amused look with the cat and the animal smacks Casavir’s arm with its soft paw.

“If you are done sightseeing, could you please answer the question?”

“I am… all right,” Casavir replies slowly. Nothing hurts too much, and his ankle seems to ache and swell in the exact way it should. He inspects his hands. The skin is blackened and flakes off, but it will be fine. He is more preoccupied with the realization that the man whose fate he had been so obsessed with for years is sitting in the same room and making soup.

The sorcerer who bent storms to his liking proceeds to chop two large onions.

“You collapsed on my threshold and I carried you here,” he pauses as if he cannot decide between annoyance and politeness. “You are heavy like a gargoyle in hibernation, and the bed is not designed for such bulky people.”

“I bring my apologies,” Casavir sits up and looks at the heap of his armour helplessly. “I did not mean to intrude. I will be on my way…”

“Oh, for gods’ sake,” the mage rolls his eyes in a way that is suspiciously reminiscent of the cat, “You are not going anywhere until your ankle heals, and even if you plan to lie that it is fine, the tempest is in full rage, and it is not going to subside any time soon. It is not like I mind you staying. We can put up with a single visitor per a decade.”

“Thank you,” Casavir cracks his neck and the mage perks up, startled by the sound. His face transforms into a grimace of slight disgust, and Casavir grows self-conscious again. So much for not disturbing epic heroes. He decides to remember his manners. “We’ve met before. I am…”

“We have met twice, Casavir of Tyr. I remember,” the mage interrupts him and throws a chunk of bread in his general direction. Casavir catches it by reflex and is slightly dizzy both from the effort and the fact that this legendary person remembers his name. The mage rises to his feet, waves the fire to burn lower, sweeps the warmth around the room by a wide circle of his hand and with a snap of his fingers pushes the warm air in the paladin’s direction.

Casavir raises an eyebrow. He has a distinct impression the great Hero of Neverwinter is showing off.

“Sorry. I have not seen a sentient being for the last two years, and I do count orcs,” he drops the chicken into the pot and closes the lid. “Imagine my feelings when I saw you propping my door with your back. You, of all people! Ah, I can see you are about to enlighten me how there is nothing special about you. Says the boy who volunteered to stand in the middle of the street full of zombies during the plague, really. Who stepped into that meatgrinder of a battle and was too shy to ask the logical question ‘What the fuck?’. How old were you, seventeen?”

“Almost nineteen,” Casavir counters in a slightly defensive voice. The mage rocks on his toes, his arms spread wide, and the shadows sprawl on the wall behind him like a large menacing eagle. The cat jumps off the bed, covers the room in several leaps like a fat grey squirrel, and the mage catches it midjump and cradles to his chest.

“Marvellous. Let us make a deal, like in good fairy tales. I share my roof, bed and food with you, and you tell me your life, Casavir of Tyr.”

Casavir searches for objections and finds none. In fact, he aches to talk to this strange man who had not aged a bit in the decade that passed. He nods, and the mage nods back contentedly before his eyes suddenly grow sharp.

“One more thing. Do not pronounce my name. I have been… experimenting with it. Is it clear?”

Nothing is particularly clear, but Casavir nods again, and the mage relaxes.

* * *

The Hero of Neverwinter milks one of the snow-white goats. The Hero of Neverwinter has built a farm on the southern slope of a high peak and destroyed all paths to it. The Hero of Neverwinter keeps several beehives and beams at Casavir when the younger man savours the thick spiced honey at dinner. The Hero of Neverwinter is too short to reach for the top shelves in his own house and he grumbles about it.

The man shifts from task to task with an intensity that rivals the storm outside, and Casavir limps after him, leaning on his crudely made crutch, and tries to keep up with the questions that scatter in all directions. He wonders if his host is a half-elf or a quarter-elf, or if this manner to ask without telling is merely a habit of all arcane talents.

“I know you did not mean to intrude,” the mage reveals in the evening sipping at his mint tea slowly. “I surrounded my household with a precipice, a dome of repelling and several wards against the searching eye. If you had been trying to find me, you would have never passed.”

“It was a coincidence,” Casavir agrees quietly and watches the shadows behind the shelves with his corner vision. They move too smoothly to be cast by the flame. “I stumbled across your wards, unaware and ignorant, and they let me in.”

The mage turns his whole body to look at his face. He measures Casavir as if he attempts to judge how difficult it would be to defeat him, and his gaze stops at the symbol of Tyr.

“With you, oh vessels of divine providence, it is hardly ever a coincidence. The Weave tightens around you, you are moths in its web, every flutter of your wings sends a signal, a threat, a plea. For a dark sage, you are a perfect sacrifice, a martyr in the making, already chained between the worlds and waiting for the appropriate dagger. For a sorcerer like me, you are a flicker of a candle that lights the web around you. For a wizard, you must be an intrigue, a mystery to dissect on the laboratory table. Am I frightening you, my dear guest?”

“No,” Casavir replies in a voice so untroubled that he surprises himself. “You are not speaking about me.”

The mage smiles longingly and sadly, and they let the name hang in the air between them. Casavir nurses his mug for a good minute and probes gingerly.

“You control the elements, and they are neither virtuous nor corrupt, aren’t they?”

“I am no wizard to control anything,” the mage snorts and grins impishly. This grin is contagious, but Casavir is too concerned to catch it. “I am a sorcerer, I tap into raw powers by instinct, let them drive me, bind them to my will. I can wield fire, but I prefer ice. I dabbled in some arts you disapprove of, but I was not successful.”

Casavir decides not to ask anything else for now.

* * *

The days run into a week, and the storm passes over. The goats and the hens are moved to the den outside, and the green-eyed mage takes Casavir on a tour. There is not much to see, and it is not like it is safe for Casavir to climb the narrow path up where the host keeps the bees or the narrower path down the slope where he came from. The winter air is crisp so high in the mountains. The days grow shorter and shorter.

Casavir tries to be considerate and spend more time outside. There is a wooden bench overlooking the small kitchen garden, so he bundles up and sits there with his notes and maps. His host, however, always finds a reason to keep an eye on him. If Casavir is outside, the man is nearby, digging hard frozen soil and taking out roots of weeds. As soon as night drowns the slope in tentative dusk, the host calls Casavir in and requests another story.

The darker it grows, the closer he sits and the more questions he asks. When Casavir’s voice is hoarse and his eyes are bleary, the mage releases him from the duty reluctantly and sends him to the bed of furs, but stays at the hearth himself, stooping and huddled. Sometimes Casavir can remember a fleeting sensation of a cold hand brushing against his shoulder in his sleep, so he assumes the mage goes to bed at some point. He always wakes up to the clutter of domestic chores, later and later every day.

The green-eyed man is very strange.

Once he suddenly rushes to the bookshelves and starts pushing the worn volumes into a heavy chest frantically. At Casavir’s silent question, he drops the lid and winces at the sound.

“Too early, isn’t it?” he enquires enigmatically and waves Casavir’s concern off.

Another evening sees them repairing the cart. It is a job for two, and Casavir bends the planks while the mage drives nails into the wood. The hammer misses the nails half the time. Casavir squints to steal a look at his fellow carpenter. He is so concentrated that his lips are pressed into a thin line and his focus could kill. A basilisk has less intent in its murderous gaze than this man trying to hit some very large nails.

* * *

When two weeks creep by, Casavir’s ankle can already hold some weight. The paladin sits by the hearth and massages it lightly. The mage gives the bare foot a distasteful look and huffs. He takes a large knife and cuts into a head of cabbage with too much force. Casavir tries to remember if elven offspring has acute sense of smell and takes a mental note to wash his feet in the morning to be on the safe side.

“Can’t you heal it? I mean, half of your stories end in ‘I was lucky to have my prayer intact’,” the Hero of Neverwinter mimics Casavir’s voice surprisingly well. “What prevents you from using your intact prayer now?”

Casavir inclines his head and struggles to fit several tomes of knowledge into a simple explanation.

“Divine healing is different from medicine, though priests are often educated in both. It is more like an immediate reversal of what was broken, torn, pierced, or smashed. The consensus is that the gods’ power either restores flesh in its previous condition or accelerates the natural process. I pray, and flesh knits itself together under my hand. I cannot heal toothache, for instance. Neither can I grow a cut off finger. Scholars argue at what point the changes in the wound become irreparable; there were miracles when priests of great conviction raised those who had been dead for several days. For artless paladins like I am this borderline seems to be the simple sunrise. So – no, I cannot heal a ligament torn two weeks ago.”

The mage forgets the cabbage; he has so much curiosity contained that it leaks outwards in thick waves.

“How does divine magic feel on your side? Sorcerers tap into the power of elements at hand, wizards – extract a force from something small, like moving rocks by the algebraic destruction of a stone. I read that the divine draws directly from the soul, from the force of emotions. Anger for some gods, greed for others. Is justice even a feeling?”

Casavir shakes his head and gives an awkward half-smile.

“It is… different. I can’t explain.”

The mage’s eyes get an evil glint and Casavir realizes too late he is still holding a knife.

“Show me,” the man demands in a voice that brooks no argument and runs his thumb against the blade. Casavir frowns.

“This is not a game,” he warns in a low voice. “It is selfish to appeal to the gods for mindless entertainment.”

The mage shrugs indifferently and sinks the knife into his own hip up to the handle without a sound. Casavir does not even remember how he rushes forward before this mad man can pull the blade out.  
Twenty minutes later Casavir walks to the bed on unsteady legs and slumps next to the wall. The mage examines the clear skin without any trace of a scar and marvels aloud.

“If your compassion can heal, how beautiful it must be inside your mind,” he turns to Casavir with obvious envy in his voice. “It must feel good to be a righteous, honest person – ironcast and unconflicted.”

Something changes in Casavir’s face, and the envy evaporates from the mage’s voice.

“Or maybe not. Forgive me. Rest.”

Casavir nods obediently, lies down, and tries to rein in his growing headache. Everything about today was weird. When he touched the knife and freed the flesh underneath it, the wound blurred in his eyes. He tried to keep it in focus, but his soft magic was bleeding into nothingness and struggled to latch on the cut. Cold sweat runs down his back when he can discern individual shapes in the shadows behind the mage by the hearth. He thinks of studying the titles of the books on the shelves, but the shelves are already empty.

He makes a sign against evil and drowns in a shallow, sticky sleep.

* * *

Another evening, and another conversation pulls them into this awkward guessing game of what is wrong. They sit together on the wooden bench they hauled inside, and the mage is wrapped in half the blankets he owns. Casavir is sure that trouble is brewing in the dusty corners. It is only a matter of time before it hits them.

“I read your letter,” the mage states out of the blue and stares at Casavir, unblinking, like a caged bird with all the time in the world. “The letter that so eloquently pictured Fenthick as a good person. Well-written, ill-received.”

Casavir does not respond, and the mage continues after a short wait.

“I thought: what a sincere boy. What a naïve, innocent person. How stupid and brave he is to brand himself with the lost cause. I thought: I will be clever and save my political suicide until the day when it matters. I thought: if I ask once, I will be granted that only wish,” he smiles crookedly. Bitterly. Casavir stirs uneasily.

“You pleaded for Aribeth’s life when every voice demanded her death,” he reminds the mage and bares one of his secret truths. “I prayed for you for years because of that impossible mercy you showed to her.”

The mage flinches and opens his mouth but says nothing at first. He hugs himself tighter and continues.

“She could escape, she had that choice. I offered her to flee the prison, and she refused.”

The truth drops to the ground heavily. Casavir wonders how many conversations they are in fact leading.

“Were the rumours about you two…”

“No, nothing like that,” the mage cuts him off quickly. “We did not even talk about it, not once.”

He keeps silent for a long time, and Casavir’s heart breaks for him, because he can sense it is a blatant lie.

“I know where she is, paladin,” the Hero of Neverwinter hisses through his teeth, and Casavir is reminded of an animal in pain. If only hands could heal these fractures. “She is in hell. She wants to be there.”

Shadows lengthen around them and circle the hearth like angry hyenas.

“What is wrong with you.” Casavir demands in a voice of order. “How can I help.”

The mage peers at him from the heap of his blankets.

“If I tell you, I am lost,” he states without any expression. The shadows crawl closer.

“Lost,” Casavir echoes. “I will tell you what is wrong then. You attempted to bring her back.”

The mage swallows a short mirthless laugh.

“I am no wizard. I could not if I wanted. Necromancy is beyond me.”

“But you talked to her.”

“If a monologue can be called talking, yes. I did.”

Casavir thinks hard. The mage stares at him hopelessly. Casavir attempts again.

“You do not want me to leave.”

“I am afraid to let you leave.”

Casavir digests this piece of information. He inches closer to the mage’s end of the bench and watches the shadows recoil slightly. With a sudden determination, he pulls the lost man into his arms and hears him give a relieved sigh. The shadows flinch back and deepen.

“Let me tell you what happened,” Casavir’s voice grows stronger and he feels the familiar hum of his faith course through his veins.

“You were desperate and dabbled in dark arts. Scrying, most likely,” he can feel the mage nod against his shoulder. “Scrying into the hells always comes with a price. You bargained. You promised secrecy, of course, but also… You sacrificed something.”

He looks around for ideas, and he can feel the mage gulp down his tears. The shadows literally _howl_. Casavir presses the shaking body to his chest. Not on his watch. He fishes for the sudden idea that glistens in the depths like a silver fish in a dark pond and he knows it is the truth as the words form on his lips.

“You had nothing left, so you sacrificed your name. Your fame that travels with it. Lord Nasher does not even know why he wants to erase you from history so badly.”

Perhaps Lord Nasher is a better man than Casavir gave him credit to be.

“But you were tricked… Your name was not wholly yours to give. Dark magic has no power over many people. I remembered you. Many people remembered you. You went to the hells and talked to Aribeth de Tylmarande, but you could not pay all the price you promised.”

Casavir watches dark outlines take shape in the corners. They have claws. He summons his holy shield and a halo of cold light encompasses himself and the poor man locked in his embrace. His signet ring gives a steady glimmer. He continues louder.

“Something followed you from the hells, and crept into your house, and you returned misplaced and torn apart by their claims on you,” Casavir takes a deep breath and invokes all the power he can to manifest in his steady, ringing voice. He hopes it is enough.

“I appeal to Tyr, the Maimed God, for justice on your behalf. I judge to seal this matter at its worth: one cannot pay in what he does not possess. By Tyr’s holy power, I declare this bargain forfeit.”  
The room grows light, both in appearance and sense.

The Hero of Neverwinter extricates himself from Casavir’s embrace, looks up into the paladin’s face with his clear eyes and smiles a slow, sincere smile.

* * *

They climb the tricky narrow path to the top of the mountain, and Casavir already knows what he will see there. The white rocks cradle a tomb. It is a simple slab of the same white stone, seven feet long and three feet wide. No blade of grass can survive at this height. The tomb is open to all winds, all stars. A cold grave with a famous name on it.

In the recent days, the mage has lost the wild energy that pushed at him from the inside and made him skip in time, but Casavir likes this serious, contemplative person even more. The quarter of elven blood – now Casavir knows for sure – gives his sadness a melodic touch that makes a mortal human heart ache all the more.

The mage presses his palm against the polished surface.

“Have you ever looked at a person and had that single moment of clarity that you two… matched? That you could be electrocuted by their pain. That you could… live in silence by their side and feel blessed?”

It is a rhetorical question, so Casavir does not bother to respond.

“I had that moment and kept it to myself. I could not let her be buried in the Tomb of Betrayers to linger there as a spirit, to find no peace for centuries. She did not deserve to be chained to her shame. Perhaps she deserved her execution, but she did not deserve torture.”

They get back to the house, each lost in their own thoughts.

* * *

It is a cold and sunny spring day when Casavir finally believes that the Hero of Neverwinter can do without him and assembles his meagre belongings. They walk to the precipice together, and the mage snorts at the sight of Casavir tying his ropes to a perfectly steady rock.

“Oh, for gods’ sake, are you some crazy grasshopper?” he laughs too hard and tears well in his eyes. Casavir understands that this is the way he masks his true emotion and takes no offense. “Let me demonstrate the proper way.”

The mage swings his arms in a shape of a crescent and an ice bridge builds itself out of thin air. Casavir inclines his head and inspects its integrity with a tip of his boot.

“Not bad,” the paladin admits with reserved kindness. The mage snorts and adds an intricate wave of his fingers that weaves beautiful banisters on both sides of the bridge. “Will do. I have a gift for you.”

He slips his signet ring off his thumb and drops it in the palm of the mage. The man turns it in his fingers and the sun reflects off the well-polished ‘C’.

“My mentor gave it to me, but it was a half-hearted gift. It has some magic in it, allegedly it guards your presence of mind. It witnessed the sealing of your bargain, and I think you need it more than I do.”

The mage nods absent-mindedly and stares at Casavir. They speak at the same time.

“You can stay here.”

“You can leave this place.”

“Ah, I am done fighting and travelling,” the mage smirks and inhales the crispy air. “I never really liked people. I have my cat and the bees and the goats and all the peace and quiet that I need. It is nice here in the summer. Are you sure you want to go out there?”

“I am not done fighting,” Casavir looks at the ice bridge with distrust and takes the first careful step. “The biggest orc clans are relocating to the northern hills, and people there are already in danger. I think I will travel to Old Owl Well and see what I can do about it.”


	12. Old Owl Well

The rough terrain between the easily noticeable peak of Wyvern Tor and the town of Conyberry used to be the frontier between two ancient rival empires, Illefarn and Netheril. It was featured in many chronicles. Casavir is both awed and disappointed to see its current state. These northern hills can be a symbol of wilderness at its worst: countless hills, crags, and rocky ridges crisscross in unimaginable ways, as if some legendary giants were breaking random chunks off the mountains and throwing them without pattern or purpose. There are a few roads winding through the hills; Casavir has seen better goat paths. Here and there he notices remnants of ruins: a ditch too straight to be natural here, a buried corner of a foundation there, a large rock with drill marks in the ravine. There must be miles of old mines underground, and all are infested with hostile inhabitants ranging from orcs and goblins to ghouls and giant spiders.

It is easy to pass orcs and goblins unnoticed, but spiders are born predators. Their shell is like seamless armour: his sword is almost useless. They also plan their ambushes like professional thieves – unbelievably logical for a mindless species. Casavir suffers several exhausting attacks before he realizes he should switch to his hammer and crack their shells. Sharp spurs on their legs leave long painful lacerations, too many to heal on his own. Casavir wraps linen cloths around the shallow wounds where they have cut through his leathers and decides he will need a full metal plate. He tries to get rid of the image of canned meat that his garrison used to buy from Mirabar. That night he sleeps in a crevice high above the path with one eye open. He must smell like dinner to anyone whose appetite cares for blood.

The two strong orc clans – the Bonegnashers and the Eyegougers – have obviously settled in the area this winter. Their presence is marked by occasional half-eaten corpses in the lairs of the spiders. It is suspicious that the clans seem to keep reluctant neutrality. Orcs are not known for cooperation, and yet Casavir witnesses two large parties cross their paths, exchange words and be on their way without any violence. Apparently Yaomig and Logram reached some sort of grudging understanding, and this is bad news. Casavir burns with the need to get to the human settlements faster. They need to be warned.

He is running out of water but charging through to Old Owl Well is not an option. All the orcs he watches from his top hill route are carrying barrels and pulling carts. They are storing water, and their supply is clearly drawn from the ancient Netherise well – the only watering hole for leagues this time of the year. Casavir cuts down his rations and thinks of the nameless Hero of Neverwinter. If he were here, he would summon some ice, and they would melt it over the fire, though he would banter for hours on mundane use of magic. Casavir smiles and lets his loneliness drive his looming thirst away. It was nice to have a friend for a while.

* * *

He makes it to a small village southeast of Conyberry. There are maybe fifty houses in it, and of course one of them has an extra room where the farmers gather for a drink. The elderly hostess does not blink an eye when he asks for a jug of water and drains it in large gulps. She pours more water and shoves the jug into his hands.

“Go into the back and sleep, boy.” She shoos him in with all the quiet power of many children’s mother. “I will make stew by the time everyone returns from the pastures, and you can pay your keep in news. We do not see many new faces around.”

The farmers listen grimly to his account of the two clans that descended from the mountains into the hills. Casavir estimates the numbers of the orcs to be about eight hundred, and the farmers stir anxiously while the elderly hostess sets plates of hot stew in front of all the assembled. Casavir can easily identify her children in the crowd – twins, a brother and a sister, twenty-five years old or so, both tanned, strong, tall and wide-shouldered. He tells them that the southern orcs drove the smaller local clans away from Old Owl Well and are storing water. It is only a matter of time before they start foraging for food and discover the villages they can raid.

“What do we do then?” It is the twin sister, Katriona, who pronounces everybody’s question. It rings in the heavy silence over the tables.

“We arm up,” Casavir circles the room with a confident gaze, chaining the individuals into a unity. “And meet them with steel.”

* * *

There are three villages close to the hills, and these villages become his frontline. All of them must be trained to fight. There are fourteen settlements scattered between these three and Conyberry; they become his rear. All of them must be warned. Out of the three frontline villages, two are defendable, but the third one has a very unfortunate location. Casavir walks around it deep in thought and takes in the rolling hills that obstruct the view from the village and display it in all vulnerability.

He counts the chimneys. This village should be abandoned. If they face a raiding party of any considerable size, this place will be a slaughter. Houses can be erected again, cattle breeds, fields are sown every spring, but a life extinguished is a life lost forever. This is a hard idea to sell, and the villagers do not take to it kindly. In their eyes, he is a panic monger. Casavir convinces, explains, threatens, pleads, but all is in vain. They will not move until they see the orcs descending the hills. It will be too late by then.

The village where he set foot first has a much grimmer kind of folk. They are reluctant to leave, for their houses store generations of memories. They have been attacked before and they do remember. The twins, for instance, were growing with a crude portrait in place of a father, and they keep his sword and his dagger as their shared relics. Casavir trains them and trains with them and considers one of them for his sergeant.

Katriona seems to be the more capable of the two, but Casavir does not understand her fully. Oliver is less versatile and focused, and yet he is simple and direct. It is so easy for his face to blur with the faces of all those nice village boys Casavir has known and his former friendships extend to Oliver inadvertently before he knows it. Katriona does not exude the same nonchalance: her words are often loaded with meanings Casavir fails to comprehend.

These two are the first to answer his call. Casavir notices a shadow run across their mother’s face: she knows what he knows. They can be taken from her forever so easily. A dozen more farmers follow their lead right away, and Casavir knows these followers solidify the twins’ fate. If you have led other people into danger, you cannot back out of it yourself.

The farmers in the third village have the same mood. They will fight first and leave when the last candle of hope goes out. Casavir can respect that emotion. He rides between these villages every other day, a whirlpool of action. He has the farmers dig trenches that will win them several kills. He sharpens logs into stakes and ties them together into simple obstacles that will win them an extra round of arrows and will make their opponents slow down before the attack. He trains everyone who volunteers to fight against heavy and strong but not very agile or particularly skilled opponents. He calls for every scrap of old armour or weapon to find its use, and when one of the widows gives him the plate armour of her late father-in-law, he accepts it with quiet gratitude: the longer he stands, the less orcs will pass him. The well-worn armour has a deep dent in the left side. Casavir hammers it flat in the backyard of the inn house and thinks of the spear that must have smashed that man’s ribs.

In these dark times, two orc clans can provide twice as many warriors for one raiding party. With the necessary preparations, Casavir’s improvised militia can fend off any number under forty; forty to sixty will be an undertaking with dear casualties, and if a large host arrives, their immediate priority is survival, not defending the property. The fighters will stand their ground as long as they can; the other villagers must be ready to flee.

Of course, these farmers live at a slower speed, different from his own agitated rush. Their determination lasts for now, but most of the families get tired of the constant nervous apprehension. They let their children run into the hills to play, they… live. Casavir is at war. He has no property, no family, no land. It makes everyone his family and all land his land. He feeds their sense of urgency best as he can. He sleeps little and rests less. His small force of forty must turn the easy paths into a maze of obstacles.

He knows they have two months if they are lucky. Orcs always raid during the harvest or right after it.

* * *

In six weeks, it starts.

Orcs swarm down the hills in numbers that exceed their worst expectations. It looks like nobody stayed behind – by the time they reach the first outpost, Casavir has dispatched two messengers to the other two villages with the command to flee. This is no ordinary raid; this is an invasion, and they are a handful of brave lunatics against the tide of enemies.

Casavir knows exactly what he is doing. He is losing the battle with the full awareness that they must slow down the attack at any cost and take on as many orcs as they can. Every single thing they have prepared serves its purpose. The trenches, the stakes, the wooden ladders, the stones hauled uphill and kept in place by a few bars, the paths narrowed by fallen trees, the oiled stacks of hay that they set on fire as they fall back to block the way for several more minutes. The militia retreat and lose a person now and then – the orcs advance and leave several corpses behind with every step. Every line of defense is broken, and Casavir’s people retreat to the next one; they fight and lose again and retreat farther.

Casavir counts steps until that narrow place he leads them to – a treacherous scry, a goat path along the backbone of the hill where one person walks with care and balance is everything. He commands his soldiers to follow the fleeing villagers, and though he notices Katriona’s brow furrow deeply, he nods for her to move and turns back to watch the orcs who are climbing the hill. The presence of fate clutches its claws around his heart and Casavir’s head swims with a heady excitement. They cannot reach him other than one by one. He is vulnerable to arrows, but orc bows are lax and the plate armour will protect him for some time. He will fall when he is exhausted, and mighty gods, did he not train all his life for this.

At this moment, Casavir feels that it is Neverwinter behind him, not some meagre villages on a hard, infertile soil. His blood sings in his veins. He bares his sword and waits for the orcs to approach.  
“You will stop here or lose your lives,” He calls out to them in their tongue, and they stand whispering, thrown off. “I am the Katalmach and I tell you: get back to your settlements and your families will see you again.”

The orcs fall silent when a tall warrior shakes his head. He is wearing a necklace of bear claws, and Casavir remembers what it might signify. Ferocity. Experience. Strength.

“Katalmach.” The leader acknowledges him with something too close to delight. “I will eat your heart tonight.”

In ten minutes, all the seven orcs are dead. Thank Tyr sword fights are short, for his sword is growing heavier by the minute, and he can feel all his muscles burn with the strain. He does not even think about switching to his heavy hammer, his arm is already shaking. Casavir breathes and stares down the path, where fresh enemies hesitate to climb the hill. He can stay here and take more lives, buy some more time. He can follow his militia. They have been fighting and running all day. He is tired. If he stays here, _he stays here_.

Casavir is tempted. The scry is not the worst place to die, and this life is heavy on his shoulders. To die means to stop caring. To break free. To lay down the burdens and banners for the living to take.  
It looks like there are not many living eager to pick up the banner, and Casavir turns around and runs. He can feel the presence of his death draw back reluctantly.

* * *

They lose, predictably. The two well-armed villages resist the invasion, flee in time, make the orcs pay a dear price for the paltry supplies they forage. The third village is a massacre – only a few families heeded the warning, and the rest perished. These were not kind deaths. These were brutal, and Casavir adds them to his ever growing mental cemetery.

It was not his fault they did not heed his warning. Or maybe he could have been more convincing, charismatic, and charming. Like those courtly knights who have the common folk eat out of their hand. They would have fared better than he did.

Both the survivors and the dead are a warning to the far settlements. This year the orcs did not expect the resistance. Next year they will scavenge farther and farther.  
With the villages gone, they are now on their own in the wilderness, and the days are growing shorter.

The bitter disappointment of loss and defeat pulls Casavir to the ground. He was fighting with impossible chances; it could have been much worse and at least they did not let the enemy bite quite as much as they wanted. He repeats these things to himself, but loss and disappointment are still loss and disappointment. He feels inadequate for the task, but orcs never disappear in thin air, and he resorts to his pet method: hating himself quietly and moving from task to task with the unhealthy focus of a sick man.

Katriona notices something is odd and attempts to corner him several times. Casavir is good at deflecting her questions without outright lies. There is a dangerous glint in her eyes when she stares him down across the campfire, and Casavir does his best to ignore it. They have a guerilla war to plan, and his emotional state is of no relevance.

“You are walking into your grave. Straight confident steps, wind in all sails, no looking back.” She tells him once. They share the first watch because she volunteered. Casavir did not want her to accompany him.

“Tyr will bring me to my grave at the due time.” He replies without any expression. Katriona huffs and lets the matter rest. She stands up and walks away, to the trees that surround the small clearing.

She is wearing his sword now, for Ollie has their father’s. It is good that Casavir carried two weapons on him. They are on their own, and no castle forges arms for them.

* * *

  
He counts his standing fighters. Twenty is not much. Twenty is a lot. Orcs are a superstitious folk. The Katalmach and his people cannot stop the invasion, but they can unnerve the invaders, bite at their heels, make them question leaving their camps, keep them reluctant to take risks. Casavir stares at the fire and strokes the cold metal of his hammer. A mean-spirited smirk curls his lips. He can take all the risks he wants and that is going to be his advantage.

They are always on the move. They attack out of the blue and disappear like ghosts. They ambush small raiding parties and track messengers and scouts. Sometimes they crawl close to an orc camp, kill the lookouts and melt into the shadows.

Casavir recollects his old thoughts about orcs living in peace with humans when he cleans pieces of brain and bone off his hammer. He wonders when exactly he lost himself in this quest for vengeance and started to live up to this crazy nickname. The Katalmach. He rolls his tired shoulders and can feel the bruising on his back send a wave of dull pain. If he were younger, he would take off his armour and assess the injury. Now he does not care that much, and it is bitterly cold, and fussing about all these links and clasps and ties is exhausting.

Slow, frozen thoughts flow in his mind as he lies down and waits for sleep to come. The flame throws fairytale shadows on the windbreaker canvas. They dance and swirl and never stop. The nights will grow even colder. They will be building bigger campfires soon, with several logs held between four thick sticks. Just like those forest bandits he saw in the Crags. Just like outlaws and criminals. Or adventurers, or travelling monks, he reminds himself.

“You could sleep in my tent.” Katriona offers faintly when they share another watch in a few days. “I would not mind. Ollie would not mind.”

“I do not think it is a good idea.” Casavir ignores the pang of interest her offer wakes in him. It is so cold in the hills and he had never felt lonelier, but this is not fair to her.

He stirs the large log in the flames. It is too raw and will not burn properly. Casavir steals a glance at Katriona and thinks that she is that kind of person who cannot have things in halves. Her fate is divided by a clear line of her choice: she is either a fierce warrior who fights with abandon or a mother of five with just as much abandon. Never both, never in balance.

He tries to imagine himself as a farmer, an owner of a home, a loving husband, a father. He cannot. Childbirth is pain and, too often, death. How can a husband who _loves_ his wife ever ask her to bear children?

It is not just warmth Katriona is offering. She is attracted by the first man in her life who shaves and pronounces full vowels. He must keep his polite distance.

* * *

An almost snowless winter arrives and leaves, and their small group grows larger with all the misplaced farmers who find no land to plough with such dangerous neighbours.

They camp in secluded places mostly, but now and then there are more wounded than one, and Casavir feels that ever-present pressure of his past choice: if only he had chosen the path of a cleric. For too many times they must dispatch several people to carry the wounded to the faraway villages. Every man and woman they lose is his fault.

Every time a death happens, Casavir mourns for weeks. He mourns by rising earlier to train and smash stones into shards, he mourns by taking more risks, he mourns by taking more inconvenient middle watches because he deserves some sort of punishment. He chants the dead names and prays: in tune with his steps on the way, in tune with his breath when he lies in the cold bedroll and stares at the stars, in tune with his heavy blows.

His body is like a thin shroud of flesh that drags after his soul. His soul burns so bright that Casavir has an illusion that his body will fall off his shoulders if he wishes.

One of the nights it is Ollie. Ollie's stomach is a mess. Life is leaving him faster than Casavir prays. He keeps repeating the holy words, but they fall on the ground like dead birds – empty and sad. The prayer is a shell of itself. Casavir finally gives up and closes his eyes for a moment, too tired and ashamed to face Ollie's sister, Ollie's uncle, Ollie's friends. _Worthless. Incompetent. My fault._

  
Katriona is screaming with her sisterly grief, and all Casavir is thinking of is that he did not have the right to ask these people to sacrifice their lives. His determination pressures them into following him through all these dangers.

In just the same way, Logram’s ambition to rule this region colours this land red with the blood of his clan. The leaders are always to blame. The leaders, the generals must fight against each other, not their armies. Casavir wonders what would happen if he showed up at the ancient mines where Logram resides – they know it now that they cut down so many strings of his messages reaching out of that place – and challenged the famed warrior to single combat.

He would be swarmed and killed, that is what would happen. It would not have saved Oliver or his twin sister who will become his sergeant like she deserved from the very beginning.

“Do you want to return to your mother now?” He asks carefully, in a soft voice.

Katriona wipes her tears off her red swollen face and hunches her shoulders stubbornly.

Of course, she desires to stay.

* * *

Every spring, snow in the Sword Mountains melts, and for two months water is a free commodity in this dry area. The orc clans retreat from Old Owl Well to hunt in the hills during the season of abundance, and a small host of the Graycloaks from Neverwinter arrives and occupies the ancient well. Their commander sends out messengers to all the local villages. Katriona and several men travel to pick up some supplies from Idsworth and deliver the two copies of maps Casavir made to the priest and the mayor of Conyberry. They return with a message for the Katalmach – join the forces, defend Old Owl Well, hurry.

Casavir considers the opportunity. He tells his people finally that if they want to join the Graycloaks, they should. He tells them honestly how his relationship with Neverwinter armies might be ruined, but they do not need to partake of his disgrace. They will be able to do a lot of good there. Collective efforts are more effective, as a rule.

All of them decide to stay. Casavir is touched and frustrated at the same time: their loyalty is misplaced. He is not his own master, and Tyr may dispose of him at any moment. He realizes that Katriona can lead them now. She would probably do better without him – his authority and experience are a heavy weight in any discussion. He does not make the best decisions; he has had years to learn it. Without him, she will be a leader. In his shadow, she will be stuck as his sergeant.

Perhaps this tiredness is a sign that he is ready to sacrifice himself for a good cause, like his old books and chapterhouse sermons implied. Perhaps paladins should die young because they lose themselves in battle if they linger too long. Perhaps, taking down the orc clan leader who unites the tribes is a worthy cause to take this final risk. If Logram dies and his guard kills the paladin right after that, it would be worth the price. Would it not?

Casavir can find no place since that idea took root in his mind. Logram is the key. He is the whip that lashes at his warriors and drives them into the hills to raid and kill and burn. This orc leader is so much stronger than the others before him that his authority is indisputable, and traditional discord within the tribes is muted by his voice, overwhelmed by the fear he instills. To kill him means to rid the hills of this plague. To kill him means to throw the orcs back into their domestic disagreements. To kill him means both to save the lives of the people and to spare the lives of the orcs they fight. Casavir is tired of killing and planning to kill more.

To kill Logram is an impossible task. Casavir’s small force is effective, but they are still peasants. If he leads them into the old mines, they will fall there. A group of thirty is noticeable. If he could leave alone, would he have a chance to enter the caves and pass them mostly unnoticed? Should he leave alone? Would he? Does he dare?

Casavir lets these thoughts tear him apart for several more days before he reasons to make the final decision tomorrow – once and for good. If in the morning he thinks it is a good idea, he will stop doubting and leave. If in the morning the courage seems a mad hope to him, he must stop clutching at it. He prays to Tyr and the Triad to guide him before he spreads his bedroll by the campfire.

* * *

That night, he dreams of another life. Similar dreams occurred to him before; rare and precious, they carried him into a routine of a different person and lasted days, weeks, years. These dreams never really abandon him because they are too detailed, too real to trust his own life.

This time, he grows up as a farmer’s son on the edge of the forest near Conyberry; he plays, he works, he wins in good honest competitions, he falls in and out of love repeatedly, fooled by every smile like a moth is fooled by a torch. He reaches his adulthood and gets drunk, and then rumours of the southern destruction reach his native village, and all the men arm up to meet the orc raid party that travels in their direction. He hears conversations about the hidden force that can appear out of nowhere to assist them, and hope raises its head in his heavy heart. He holds his newly forged spear – a knife and a stick, really – a little straighter as they set up their carts and wagons into barricades at the main road.

The procession of orcs is not what they expected. Casavir stirs uneasily in his sleep, and the young farmer – _himself_ – grows upset and then frightened. The orcs are not in a hurry. They are victorious, triumphant even; they whoop and whistle. They also carry something heavy with them, and the farmers watch them intently as the orcs approach, set up their load and fall back.

It is a plank nailed to another plank in the form of a ‘T’, and there is a human-shaped piece of meat on it. The young farmer boy mistakes it for a sheep’s carcass for a moment, but he knows he is wrong immediately – it is a human body, a man beaten and skinned and rotting already. Bones protrude through the inflamed flesh; a mess of muscle and torn skin is black with in-life bruising. One of the orcs raises his fist to the sky and shouts.

“Here is the new banner of Logram the Eyegouger. This is your Katalmach.”

The young farmer falls to his knees and heaves.

Casavir wakes up and cannot slip back into his own skin for a while. Well, if the gods wanted to give him advice, that would be it. He resolves to keep from going to the Eyegougers’ lair on his own.

* * *

It was a day like many others, but many years later Casavir will remember the moment when they tracked several dozen orcs setting an ambush. He did not have the time to take a close look who their target was – some travellers, armed but very disadvantaged. It was a chain of decisions too rapid to notice the details.

They follow the orcs into the narrow valley, the orcs turn back, the usual nightmare begins: block, step forward, hit with all the force. Casavir blocks and steps forward and lands his hammer on the unlucky enemies methodically. There are too many, but he has seen worse odds and lived.

Some of the orcs do manage to land a hit, and once a spear pierces his side between the armour links briefly. Casavir turns to face the opponent, but Katriona has already cut him down, and he sends her a grateful nod. There is no time to pause and look at the wound.

He feels blood slowly soaking his shirt under the armour. It is a strange feeling, heat in the center and cold seeping all around it. There are more orcs coming at him, and Casavir slows down carefully, swings his hammer with less flourish, strains his left side more. The right leg of his breeches is getting wet too, the cold in his side blooms larger, and he tries to breathe lighter, with his chest. Of course, he ends up winded, but his tunic now sticks to his skin unpleasantly, and if he is lucky the coagulated blood will seal the wound until he has the time to take care of it.

A magical fire roars, and Casavir looks around slowly to find the last orcs dead on the ground, their corpses smoldering. He turns to see the adventurers – two women, an elf, a dwarf, and a gnome – approach and suddenly forgets his name, his wound, everything.

The fate hooks Casavir under his ribs and pulls him forward. _This mismatched band_ , his blood pounds in his ears like ravens' forlorn cries and words form in his mind on their own, _this ridiculous company is what will bring down the gods' will upon you_. His death travels with them. His sword belongs with them.

Casavir is stunned and his tongue is thick when they exchange the usual words – names, information, offers of help. One of the women has horns on her head, but Casavir ignores this fact. He stares at the leader, the sorceress, at her singed leather gloves, at her simple clothes, at her sweat-soaked hair – and he sees a silver light encompassing her, hears the fate in her voice, _senses_ that she is destined to fight a great evil and _you must be with her_. He did not expect this feeling. He did not expect that what he has believed to be his life would turn out to be a mere preparation for a bigger journey and a much more important quest.

Casavir hears himself say that he will accompany them to Logram's lair. He registers Katriona's objection vaguely, but the fog in his head clears only when the sorceress gives him a concerned look and says something in an urgent, insistent tone.

"I beg your pardon?" He blinks at her hand pointing at his feet.

"I said: tomorrow. You are bleeding." Ingrid repeats patiently, her voice soft like a feather in the wind. "There is blood dripping down your hip, sir."


	13. Ingrid

And so the travel begins.

They deal with Logram the Eyegouger _on the way_. Ingrid, the sorceress from West Harbour, is locked in a veritable sea of unknown variables. An orc chieftain seems a minor nuisance in comparison with mysterious extraplanar psionic warriors that hunt a cryptic silver artefact from a secret old war with alleged demon involvement. Casavir digests this information over his first few days on the road with the new companions. They are a strange bunch: a loud dwarf with a heart of gold, a reformed tiefling thief, a young elven druid who has hardly left her swamp before and a gnome bard whose mind jumps over ideas like a mad squirrel. This is the team this young sorceress prefers to travel with through the dangers so much bigger than a human’s normal experience.

Paladins do not argue with destiny when they are blessed to recognize it, so he asks Ingrid if he can accompany them. Perhaps, until Neverwinter, for he is not welcome there. He left it in disgrace. Ingrid touches his shoulder briefly – a butterfly wing of reassurance – and nods.

They reach Old Owl Well, and he discovers that the commander of the local force is Callum. Khelgar informs him that they found the Katalmach and here he is in person, and Callum visibly cannot decide whether he should act as a lord or an old mentor. Ingrid steps in without hesitation and suddenly her voice has steel in it. Casavir watches in amazement as this well-mannered sorceress, almost a stranger to him, tells off a member of the Neverwinter Nine on his behalf; she says that if anyone wants to accuse Casavir of anything, they will have to deal with her now, and Lord Callum backs off immediately – it is the good old Commander Callum now.

Casavir is not used to being protected. It is a nice feeling. It is a surprise that Khelgar and Neeshka and Elani and even Grobnar suddenly form a unified front as if he is one of their own. He learns that Ingrid has an incredibly special way of forging loyalty: the loyalty given to her is never one-sided. Nevalle, and Ophala, and Judge Olaf, and Lord Nasher himself will have to choose to ignore his presence or confront her. And the times are troubled again; there is need for another selfless hero to solve the noble lords’ problems while their manicured hands stay clean.

* * *

They assist the city militia in restoring order in the docks, and fight the crew of a Luskan spy ship, and get access to the Blacklake District. The old sage Aldanon tells them of the war of Ammon Jerro and that the two silver pieces Ingrid bears in her bag are shards of a githyanki silver sword and of course the astral warriors are eager to have them back.

“They can have the shards back. I am so tired.” Ingrid tells him quietly on the way to the archives, and Casavir almost turns back to see if there is someone behind him – if she places her confidence in him by mistake. “I have not finished my studies. I was at my father’s, visiting, and suddenly there are the githyanki, lizardfolk, bandits, orcs, cultists raising the undead all around. I long to be back to my books. My life story should be called ‘How everything interrupted Ingrid’s reading’. It is ironic that an ordinary person can become so tangled in some larger plot.”

 _There is nothing ordinary about you_ , Casavir thinks as she smiles ruefully and walks on without waiting for his response. The archive door is hanging open and there is blood in the anteroom, so he does not have the chance to get back to this thought before it is ridiculous to bring it up.

Then there is the trip to Highcliff to warn Shandra Jerro that the githyanki will hunt her down, and Casavir slightly hopes there will be a peaceful evening for a slow conversation when they get back to Neverwinter, but as they pass through the southern gates Ingrid comes across a friend. He is a fair young wizard from her academy, a handsome boy and a noble. They stay back and talk, and then Ingrid catches up with her companions to tell them that she will stay at Elon’s for the night. Casavir cannot quite place that ugly feeling he experiences. They spend a month tracking Shandra’s kidnappers into the northern hills and the odious ranger, Bishop, gives a new poisonous context to all their relationships. This is when Casavir realizes the name of that feeling was jealousy.

In the quiet of his mind, he laughs at himself. He had no right for jealousy. He is an old warrior Ingrid picked up on the way, an aide and maybe – if he is lucky – a friend. She is eight years younger. She is clever, confident, strong, powerful, chosen, and he should remember his place. It is his lifelong loneliness speaking. She is kind to all of them, and he is not used to kindness, so he mistakes her general love directed at the world for something exceptionally his.

Casavir smiles and congratulates himself that he recognized this illusion before it could take control of him. Ingrid is free to spend her nights with whoever she pleases. It is none of his business.

* * *

When they learn that Ingrid has a shard of a legendary silver sword lodged in her chest, Casavir is almost unsurprised. The githyanki prefer to die rather than let her keep it, and their last dark warning is about a great evil raising its head in their world. It may be the last curse – empty words, hollow threats. Ingrid’s future cannot be that dark. She deserves a better fate.

Casavir does not have many illusions about his own future though. He will inevitably die in battle, and if he is lucky, his death will be worth it. If he is completely honest, he would also like for his death to be quick. He would prefer not to rot slowly with his guts out in the mud. He had been close to the threshold of life and death before, and he is a little afraid, but he pushes that shameful thought down as if it is his worst enemy.

He is the only one in their company to have seen the Luskan war. He was seventeen, more a boy than a man, and it was ages ago. This experience separates him from them. In his eyes, it gives context to everything; his companions do not have this ominous feeling of everything falling apart regardless of their will and effort. Casavir treasures their ignorance.

When he was young, corruption seemed an essential flaw of leadership – but now he knows it is not true. Not every leader leaves dying soldiers behind. Not every blade strikes to kill. Not every conflict ends in blood. His heart is full of joy every single time he witnesses that Ingrid prefers conversation to bloodshed. He prays that she remains strong in her faith that all living souls deserve life. She is not one to demand sacrifices and give pious speeches that justify why people should sleep in the snow or eat rotten bread. No, Ingrid respects dignity of simple needs. She plans everything and plans everything well. They always have a large tent, one for all the team, and Ingrid and Grobnar spend a good week trying to figure out a small, safe, and easily assembled stove to heat it.

Later, when he will try to identify the exact moment of falling in love with her, he will always come back to that evening conversation about magic. She told him that it takes sorcerers months to learn a new spell.

"Most of my fellow students would try to use those precious months to learn something spectacular. Lightnings, fireballs, ice storms. How many methods of destruction does one need? I mastered fireballs because, well, you need fire often, for many purposes. Magical arrows are a compulsory part of the curriculum, and that is about enough harm. I seek pragmatic utility. Making water hot, helping people sleep, raising invisible barriers between the harmful and the vulnerable. An arrow stopped is better than an arrow notched. Seeing what is concealed is important, as well as making a heavy thing weightless to move it. Finding water. Making a blade sharp again. Since we started this reluctant adventuring, I also learned a spell to hide our campsite in darkness and illusions. Now I am learning to freeze the opponent' feet to the floor because, seriously, what is it with all these bandits attacking before we can talk?"

Casavir did not register the moment when he started mentioning Ingrid in his daily prayers. Neither did he register the moment when she became the single focus of them; the only thing he wants from his god is her well-being.

Faith is not a crime. He is doing nothing wrong.

* * *

They discover more cult chapters all over the Sword Coast, and one of them is right in Neverwinter. That week Lord Nevalle graces the Sunken Flagon with his visit, and for a moment Casavir hopes it is because of their report.

Of course, it is not. The Luscanite ambassador has accused Ingrid of the Ember massacre and Lord Nasher offers her knighthood to hold her trial here in Neverwinter. Casavir knows that all these events are the same spiral that is coiling tight. The silver shards, the undead rising from their graves, the Shadow War and Luskan are somehow connected. Ingrid is in danger because she has the power to undermine someone’s evil plan.

They spend two months collecting evidence – from Neverwinter to Port Llast to Ember to the Duskwood. The imminent trial is hanging over them like tons of stone in the underground caves they explore there. Despite the assurances of Sand, the moon elf lawyer who travels with them as the Crown’s support and supervision, Neeshka is confident that the trial will be a fluke, and many others share her doubts. Casavir overhears Bishop offering Ingrid to run away into the woods one night. Ingrid responds softly that she still believes in justice, and the ranger laughs at her. It is likely that the ranger knew that Casavir was listening to their conversation: the man fishes for anything that can hurt Casavir’s feelings and applies salt to his wounds with a merciless hand.

Casavir will believe in justice if he is the last person in Thoril to do so. He knows his beliefs are not as complex as others’, but he had deliberately constructed himself so that he has unity of speech, mind, and deed, and he knows that if he cannot say some sentence aloud, he should not be thinking it either. He is boring and predictable. It is good to be boring and predictable. When he is troubled by what strangers say about him, he thinks of a simple undecorated sword, predictably sharp, reliably heavy. He is a sword like that.

Casavir may be uncomplicated, but he is not stupid. He absorbs knowledge, he has a formidable memory, he breaks complex problems into tiny pieces and reconstructs them back with just as much ease. He sees people in their own course and knows that most decisions are made reluctantly, when there is not enough information, time, and interest – and therefore any quick judgement is usually wrong. Blind mercy is still better than educated cruelty.

At this point, Ingrid knows him better than anyone, and he is grateful to her for the deep conversations of history and philosophy they sometimes have by the campfire. He had not known he was starving for them before his hunger was satisfied. To think that she might be sentenced to death for the crime she did not commit is unbearable. Casavir lets his mind explore the situation if Tyr’s clergy will judge her guilty like it happened to Fenthick Moss and Lady Aribeth. He discovers that he will abandon his faith if the price of it is Ingrid’s life.

He is a traitor in his heart already, for what is faith, tradition and decorum when put on the scales against one innocent soul?

* * *

The trial comes and goes, and though they clearly prove that Ingrid is not guilty, the Luskan side demands trial by combat. It is believed that Tyr will allow the virtuous to prevail; the Luscanites obviously believe in nothing but brute force. Their champion is a monstrosity of a human, and Casavir learns how fragile his faith really is as he wears a trench in the stone floor of the temple waiting for the solitary part of Ingrid’s vigil to be over so that she is allowed visitors. It is finally his turn to enter the small chapel, and he does not notice the priests whispering behind him.

Ingrid is on her knees on the cold marble. She is so small compared to her tomorrow’s opponent. Her wrists are narrow like branches of a young tree, and in her light linen tunic she is like a candle in the cold gloom of the temple. Casavir is overwhelmed by everything he wants to say. _I love her_ , the thought bursts from the bud like pearl-white petals and blooms in his heart, _I love her_.

He implores her to let him be the champion in her stead.

“Thank you,” Ingrid says in a strange, deep voice and takes his hands. Her palms are freezing. “Judge Olaf asked me to ask you. He said that Tyr will protect you, and the people will see that faith is not an empty sound, and that you will see it as an honour. But Casavir, I am conflicted and afraid: do you all trust your god so thoroughly? Are you confident of the victory just because I am falsely accused?”

If he lies to her that they are confident that Tyr protects the innocent, she will calm down and go into that arena herself. If he tells her the truth that they have no way of knowing the gods’ will, she will go into that arena herself because she will try to protect him. Instead, he presses her hands to his heart to warm them and says:

“I trust my sword, and my shield, and my devotion. I believe that the gods keep an eye on us, and that Tyr will hear my prayers. It is unknown to me if we deserve his direct interference. Ingrid, let me bear this burden. Grace me with your trust.”

Ingrid does. Two lives are now hanging in balance, and perhaps Tyr will notice them.

Casavir prays and thinks that to be loved by someone might give you strength, but to love someone gives you courage.

He defeats Lorne the next morning, and as the crowd roars in appreciation of his victory, he can only think of his private secret that he carries like a stolen rosebud – under his shirt, close to heart, invisible yet there.

* * *

The events that follow blur into a fast series of rushed decisions and hasty missions. The Luskan plot takes shape, it now features a name – ‘Black Garius’, a Hosttower mage that has gone rogue and aims to summon and bend some ancient force to his service, and the cultists are a link in this plan, a small army to forge a larger army of the undead who feel no pain and question no orders.

Meanwhile, it turns out that several lords possess other silver shards – they are mere collectors of curiosities and relics, but their mansions are attacked, and their kin and staff are slaughtered brutally. By demons and devils, two varieties of evil that are even worse than undead creatures.

They keep watch over the lords’ houses and fight and fight and fight. Then Aldanon, the old sage with proclivity for confusing monologues, is kidnapped and for a long time it is unclear whether he is alive. Ingrid grows thinner by the month; she is troubled by all this uncertainty and death.

Casavir’s gaze lingers on her longer than he wishes to accept. He has grown attuned to every change in her expression, every little breath, every gesture. He is always aware of her stance, of her motions, of her feelings. Recently, he realized she knows that – she nods instead of saying ‘yes’ because she knows he will always notice it. He did not suspect that he held his breath to hear her speak until she glanced at him with those intelligent, piercing eyes of hers, and he caught a ghost of a smile on her lips. Ingrid is too kind to laugh at him, but it is likely that she understands this longing of his more clearly than he does. He is a novice, and she is a grandmaster at reading hearts and minds.

In the privacy of his tiny room at the inn, Casavir stares into the darkness. When he was her age, the attention of older women seemed so inappropriate to him. If Ingrid can read his heart, his feelings must look gross to her. Undesirable. Tainting. When did he grow so old? Early years trudged by slowly and could fit so many events – and then they rushed by like mad mountain winds. He does not have a right to think of her. It is not fair to her.

Everybody who has a heart shall love her if they get a chance to be close to her for a few weeks. It has been two years since they met. Who can blame Casavir for having been drawn to this magnet of a person?

* * *

A month later they get a tip that Black Garius keeps Aldanon prisoner in the ruins of the Crossroad Keep. They travel there to storm it, interrupt a ritual so dark that Casavir’s blood goes cold in his veins when they approach the spell circle, rescue Aldanon and a mysterious Githzerai seer who reveals the truth to them finally.

They are entangled in two plots, not one. The first underwater danger is the King of Shadows, an ancient Illefarn guardian who is rising to avenge the long dead empire, the other is Ammon Jerro, a powerful warlock who sold his soul to the nine hells in order to get the means to fight this King of Shadows.

None of the parties will care for what destruction they may bring to the Sword Coast, and the Crossroad Keep must rise from the ruins to be the heart of the coming war.

Ingrid becomes its Knight Captain and aims to turn it into a prosperous city with enough military strength and allies to protect Neverwinter. It will be several years before her plans take flesh and she will earn the grudging respect of the sceptics who said she was too young and inexperienced for the job.

* * *

They are always so close. It drives him mad, to be that close and eight years apart. She is a natural force in the vessel of a human body, a contained storm, a magical being. Everything she does is right and has a reason. He is an old soldier under her command – experienced, knowledgeable, valuable, but old. Soldiers do not live that long; he should have died in the Luskan war. Everyone else did.

Her construction is ambitious, and he is of use – he can train her recruits, he knows a lot about fortifications, and he can command several hundred people to work as an entity. He is an asset to this castle and town, but merely because too many better and more experienced people perished before them and there is no one else.

It is inappropriate to confess his love to Ingrid now, because it is laughable and, honestly, scary – to have been loved by your friend for years, to have felt safe and relaxed in his presence and to have been unaware of his indecent longing. Casavir thinks that his love is now ridiculous and late.

“Stay alive, Casavir,” Ingrid tells him once when his shield arm is badly injured. She is worried. Her face is pale, and she keeps touching his shoulder. He should not be reading too much into it – his head is clouded with potions, and people always touch the wounded to reassure themselves. “I measure my thoughts against your opinion. I am not an inherently good person like you are. I often see manipulation as art. I falter and consider easier paths, shortcuts, compromises. I am too inspired by the fickle love of a crowd. Without you, I will be lost. Stay alive.”

It would be easier for Ingrid if he could just forget about his feelings and have less layers in her presence. This duality of meaning is haunting him, for whenever he speaks to her, his words imply more than she can extract from them, and he is being dishonest in this covert way.

Casavir reflects on it calmly and judges that with so much fighting and this morbid war brewing in the marches of Merdelain he will probably perish soon, and his mute love will rest with him, so there is no need to trouble Ingrid.

* * *

The town and the keep need workforce. Farmers, craftsmen, merchants, soldiers, workers. People need safety to settle here; safety requires for the land to be populated – the fields, the roads, the villages. All his experience is used and challenged here: he trains recruits in the morning, leads patrols during the day, takes part in the military construction council in the evening. There is almost no time to think about this exhausting feeling that nestles in his chest like a big bright phoenix.

If only they saw each other less often. He sometimes leads a company to defend their borders; the first day apart hurts the worse, and then the pain grows dull. It never disappears though. There is always some invisible string that ties him to her and pulls him to the castle whenever she stays behind.

Ingrid is not a predator. She does not make any effort to show off, to attract, to seduce. She is more like the forest, the sky, the sea – she exists to her own purposes, she follows her chosen path she sees with her eyes closed. She does not flirt with him like he watches her do with other men: like it is a game conventional in these foreign lands and she accepts it as a ritual dance but maintains her distance. Instead, she treats him with complete trust, with calm respect, with chaste confidence. She wears no polite masks with him; she lets him stand as close as he dares; she always answers his questions with naked, striking honesty – letting him into her mind, into her heart, into her memories without reservation.

Whenever he appears in her sight, she has a smile for him, a slow and warm and fond smile that blooms on her lips. In conversations, in heated debates, in pointed exchanges on the road, her eyes often seek his silent advice or support – and he often catches how her face softens when she turns to him. She receives his pain as if it is her own. She lets him simmer in her friendship that looks like something stronger than a most romantic love he has read or heard songs about. This chaste affection drives him mad more effectively than any frivolous flirtation could. This intimacy burns, this benevolence tortures, this devotion wrings his heart out, because any moment without it starts to feel increasingly like rejection. Ingrid is not a predator, but he is prey head over heels.

Love is not a pleasant feeling. It can crush bones with its weight.

* * *

The town seems such a peaceful place now, but Casavir does not see streets – he sees routes to be defended if the enemy breaches the walls. He takes in the fields at sunset, and his mind paints them burning. His gaze travels to the walls. There is so much to do, and so little time. The tide is rising. This tide will put every single decision to test. Every person will show their true nature under the duress, and some of them are weak links in their armour. Bishop, for instance.

Bishop is a threat. Sometimes he stares directly at Casavir, and the paladin's flesh creeps. This cold stare holds a dark promise. A cannibal would stare like this. Casavir has a momentary impression that in Bishop's mind he is screaming with pain and shakes this vision off as soon as he can. Bishop gives him a crooked smile and Casavir turns away.

He is sure that the ranger will be a problem. He is a problem already, but the man is competent, agile, talented. Evil. Casavir regrets that Ingrid does not send Bishop away. Casavir regrets that they have ever met. Casavir wonders how the planets will move if he kills Bishop.

The ranger smells of fate – reeks of it, in fact. He is caught in its tenets like an ugly poisonous fly, the whole net is vibrating with his anger and intense dissatisfaction. This man is a bad omen. On his own, in the wild, he is bound to be the rotten step that brings down heroes and kingdoms. Within their view, his poison is brewing slower.

Ingrid told Casavir once that Bishop might be a key to the future they dread, and she would like to keep him close and understand him. Casavir has been thinking about it ever since. Sometimes you cut one knot and break the whole net. The ranger’s words are often poisonous in the way to resonate in his heart, but he does put his effort into their mission.

Casavir sometimes dreams that it is the ranger who kills him. Perhaps Bishop is simply a danger to Casavir, not to all of them. Well, if the gods need his pain to be some sort of price for an advantage for Ingrid, he will take the pain gladly.

Martyrs in the making, the Hero of Neverwinter once said of paladins. Casavir has a vague suspicion that every single word he has ever heard will somehow be woven into the single tapestry at the end.

He is so pathetic with this untimely, unnecessary, unwanted love of his.

* * *

It grows worse when they travel together, and these travels start to happen more often. They seek out allies on diplomatic visits, and every single lord attempts to solve their long-term problems with their hands, whether it is a dragon in the mountains or a petty conflict. They take a long journey to Arvann where the ruins tell the story of the creation of that King of Shadows and learn of the way to dismantle his power. It leads them on in search of five Illefarn statues. It means too many cold nights in proximity, too much riding and climbing and walking together. Healing, and bandaging, too. Shared watches. Shared space. There is no distance to keep. So many people were attracted to each other simply because the road pushes two souls together like nothing else.

At times Ingrid smiles at him, and his very essence flutters with the intensity of feeling: he can feel the sunlight that warmed her childhood, hear her silver laughter during the moments she was happy. She coils the world into a tight circle around herself. Her presence charges the atmosphere. Can he be the only one who notices that?

Even if he confesses to her now – serves his soul for her to discard at will – what choice will he give her? Ingrid is building up her power. This is neither her aim nor desire, but she sees it as her unique method of giving flesh to whatever ideas she deems worthy. She navigates the waters that had drowned him, serves the realm on her own terms, and follows her path that – by a coincidence – leads up the ladder of power. Casavir recognizes the displeasure in the lords' well-powdered faces when they behold him by her side. He is a wild card, a possible traitor, an unreliable step, an unpredictable voice to them. They smell that he answers to no one except his god and his own reason. They somehow fail to see that Ingrid is made of the same rock. She is still unblemished by public disobedience.

Casavir grimaces in the darkness of their common tent. If he confesses to her and she rejects him, he will be dust, for the very thought of it makes him part at the seams. If he confesses to her and she accepts him, he will pull her down, keep her back, deprive her of the ambiguity she needs to maneuver between the cliffs of social contracts. Between the two paths, he would like none. So, it is best if he keeps silent as long as he can. Probably, until his heart burns out to ashes or explodes or spills over.

Once he dreams of a grey room, a butcher's table, a bald woman carving into Ingrid's unconscious body with a knife, and he cannot do a thing about it. He wakes up in cold sweat. Ingrid is in the tent beside him, her breath is even and slow. He rolls on his side to take a closer look at her serene face. It was just a dream. The dreams always are what you saw, what you wish and what you are afraid of.

Casavir is afraid to lose her, that must be it.

* * *

They seek out the last statue in the Illefarn ruins of Merdelain right near Ingrid’s birthplace to discover the village of West Harbour destroyed utterly and its inhabitants slaughtered to a man. Ingrid walks through the familiar streets in silence and tears stream down her face. Her adoptive father is not there. Her friend Bevil is not there. All the others are dead. Unburied, left to rot. It is Ember all over again, but this time the attackers were not people. These were demons and devils and shadows. The last statue is destroyed, and there are shadow reavers waiting for them in an ambush.

Ingrid summons so much fire in that battle that ugly brown stones melt into long rusty-coloured streams of lava. Casavir is afraid that she will grow cruel – who would not in her place?

They return to the village to bury the dead. Ingrid asks Casavir to share a silent vigil with her, so that the proper rituals are observed for the dead to rest in peace, beyond the reach of necromancers and evil spirits.

Bishop calls them crazy yet hangs around reluctantly. In between the prayers, Casavir remembers that Bishop loses his nerve at the sight of the undead. Several years ago, they were setting up their camp when several skeletons stumbled upon them. Bishop sent arrow after arrow at them though they could do nothing to the bare bones, and then he shifted behind Casavir and gripped his shoulder to the point of pain, scared to death, forgetting their animosity completely. Casavir hoped that would end it. It did not.

They do encounter undead creatures more often than anything else these years. Old corpses rise in swamps, in village cemeteries, in castle catacombs. They wander the earth aimlessly, haunt the wild nature, rip the living creatures apart if they are not fast enough to run or strong enough to fight. For too many times Casavir had to summon his blessing and sprinkle holy water on his hammer.

On their return to Crossroad Keep, Ingrid pledges her life to Sehanine, the elven goddess of the Moon that her adoptive father prayed to. She does not grow cruel and does not seek vengeance. She finds solace in her faith and seeks to restore the Sword of Gith, to save others from the bitter fate of her homeland.

Priesthood suits her so much.

* * *

Ammon Jerro joins them in redemption of his granddaughter’s death at his hands – by mistake and through misdirected malice, and they obtain the necessary shards for Ingrid to forge the Silver Sword of Gith by the power of her will.

Now the sword is whole, and she is a beacon of light, too beautiful to be human. She is the heart of the sword. She is the sword. There will be no mercy and no escape for her: the King of Shadows will need her dead, for she is the weapon and while she exists, he is vulnerable.

Casavir's gaze takes in the miracle unfolding begore them and travels beyond it. He sees the narrow lines of clavicles above her neckline. He sees her stubborn set of shoulders – proud yet tired, so very tired. He sees the small wrinkles that concerns have placed on her brow. She has buried too many people to stay young. Even this moment of triumph unfolds in the cemetery of her childhood.

His gaze circles their companions. Their faces reflect various degrees of awe, the recognition of the moment worthy of legends, some elation, some disbelief. Sand is trying to conceal the fact that he cannot be cynical now. It does not matter. What matters is that Casavir feels that this moment sets Ingrid apart from all of them. This fabric of legends shrouds her humanity more effectively than noble titles and power ever could. She is now a magical being, a weapon as much as a human, and from this moment on she will be very lonely.

Casavir's heart breaks a little for her. He closes his eyes for a second to let this intense feeling encompass him and nurture his determination.

When he opens his eyes, Ingrid is looking right at him. She is sad and serious, but her lips curl in a hapless, understanding half-smile when their eyes meet, and Casavir suddenly realizes he was not the only one who followed every breath and hung on every subtle change in expression and ached to touch but never dared.

He must confess. It may be the last year of their life, and it is only a matter of time before they set off into the swamps of Merdelain for the final confrontation, but there will not be a single day this year when Ingrid should be torn apart by loneliness.

His love can be her strength, too.

**Author's Note:**

> This story grew from a simple idea: Casavir must be a much more complex man that the OC story gave him credit. This thought haunted me for quite some time and resulted in this long stream of text. I am afraid that it revealed too much of my own fears and aspirations, for you can never live with the character for several months and escape filling their shell with your own fights and struggles. Anyway, this is over now. Hopefully, this game will let me go.
> 
> Do comment if you read it to the end - I am afraid the fandom is dead, so raise your voice if you are still with it.


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